Drinking Tea Inside The Golden Pavilion
by Mercurial Weather
Summary: Collection of one shots.Ch 6 Flowers and the Detective: Clingy. She had no backbone, literally. She'd always needed someone strong to cling to. Is Leo up to the task and can he survive the experience? D might have something to say
1. Dragonfly

_D lands himself with a wild ride and a lot of pretty devil's horses._

_**Foreword: This is a collection of one-shots and each chapter can be read independently, some might not be rated T but I'll warn you at the beginning of the chapter. I blame this first story on a guy that likes to push the envelope; it's nice sometimes, but on occasions he can be taxing. He was third-degreeing me over a cup of coffee about the path I'd dare not tread but have considered. I'm a snake in the Chinese horoscope and, therefore, slippery so I managed to avoid a straightforward answer. But he got me thinking. Red, here's your answer. Oh and the guy was born in the year of the horse.**_

Pet shop of Horrors

Dragonfly

_赤蜻蛉__(The red dragonfly-)  
__かれも夕が__(In some way or another)  
__好じゃやら__(He likes the evening too)  
By the XVIII century Japanese poet: Issa (__一茶__)._

María de las Mercedes, Mer for her friends, was born in the year of the horse at the hour of the tiger; she gave her mother a 30 hrs labor and, the minute the good lady had set her blood shot eyes on her, she had known this child would be a wild one. Mer had bewitched her father with a wink and a blubbering smile, she had him in her grasp ever since. He was the first of many; by the time being with her was no longer a felony, she had a long list of broken hearts behind her.

This girl had never known true opposition and thought 'No' meant she just had to work harder to get her way. Her parents had given up on trying to hold the reins of this fast running pure blood; her brother was two years her senior and was an optimist, so he had picked up the baton and was doing the best he could.

Bruno was the only man that gave to Mer with no strings attached that was why she loved her brother dearly. That's also the reason why -when his pet got sick- she was willing to move mountains to help him. She actually hated the little creature that disputed her sibling's affection. It was an ugly Xoloescuintle, some sort of Prehispanic bold rat that was allegedly a dog. One day it had stopped eating and Bruno was wasting away with the slip of life he adored.

Veterinarians hadn't worked so Bruno was ready to try anything. That was good because one of Mer's acquaintances had suggested a very unconventional alternative. They walked to Chinatown, to some dingy Pet Shop looking for a man that was said to be the answer to their prayers.

"That's a man?!" Bruno's skepticism was well justified. He or she, who the hell knows, was of light built, wore a lovely kimono, had a silky black bob, long fingernails and the most intriguing pair of mismatched eyes. Mer thought: _'Who cares? This D person is gorgeous'_.

He claimed he was male and a Count, of all things. Mer was immediately infatuated with the guy. She had put on her best smile and raised a coquettish eyebrow. That usually was enough to bring them to their knees, but this creep ignored her and went straight for the rat.

"Look at you, poor dear. What has gotten into you?" he had asked in a tender tone. Teoxihuitl was a nasty bitch that didn't allowed anyone but Bruno to touch her; so Mer was expecting her to bite the guy. But, nope… the bitch melted in his hands whining and waving her tail. Can't blame her, not even the bitch was immune to this guy's charm.

Bruno looked hopefully towards the guy and said: "She stopped eating about two weeks ago. No one can explain why. The doctors say there's nothing physically wrong with her. Can you help her?"

D looked at Bruno with his golden eye. "You really love her."

That was a rhetorical question but Bruno had nodded emphatically.

D carried on: "Your little Turquoise is perfectly fine. She is just scared."

Mer blinked: "Wow! That's odd. Very few people know that's what its name means. It's Nahuatl, the ancient Mexicans language. Come to think of it, we never mentioned it. How did you know that's the dog's name?"

He looked at Mer with his violet eye: "This... lady, is to blame."

"What? He's lying, Bruno. You know I don't give a damn about that thing, I barely look at it. I won't lose my time given it frights."

"That's not what she tells me."

"This man is nuts. I mean, he claims he hears the dog speaking to him. What is it telling you? That you have to kill someone or buy a new dress?"

"Teoxihuitl says that you told her she was been fed for slaughter," D said looking at Mer with disgust while he began burning some incense.

"That's not true", the lie came out of her lips without a pause but Mer had blushed. The incense was making her feel dizzy. That's why, instead of keeping her mouth shut, she kept talking: "I… I didn't mean it that way… I just said that in prehispanic times they ate them. And that's true… I… Bruno…" The incense was making her nauseous, she had to sit down.

Bruno looked at her disapprovingly, then he picked up his rat and stared at its eyes: "My lovely jewel, I would never let anyone harm you."

The bitch batted her eyelids and licked his nose. He left without looking back.

Mer was in shock, she couldn't breathe. After a minute or so, she finally rised from the sit. She lounged towards D with clenched fists. But, before she could slap him silly, a bat winged bunny came between them. There were a lot of weird beasties there that she hadn't noticed before. Were their shadows elongating, taking on human form or was she having a hallucination? She didn't stay long enough to find out. Mer threw D a contemptuous look and left with her head held high. She bumped into a dumb blond that had ogled her breast and whistled. He had ended up paying for D's sins, Mer slapped him.

"What's wrong with that broad?" asked Leo rubbing his cheek.

"My dear detective Orcot, one would think you're used to getting slapped by now. Especially considering you refer to ladies with the word broad. But, for once, your instincts are right. That woman means trouble. People seldom understand how hard it is to sell dreams…" said D starting the diatribe he always used when he wanted to imply that nothing was wrong in his little Chinatown Pet Shop.

Leon Orcot interrupted him, he had listened to the discourse a hundred times and he wasn't buying: "That gal should get in line. I mean trouble for you too. I'm here because the Chief wants us to look at some claims of a man eating ferret on the loose. Of course, the first place that came to mind was your little shop of horrors…"

"I know nothing of the matter," said D as he escorted Leo towards the door.

"I brought cake," said the detective dangling the box of one of the most famous bakers in town.

"Oh then, my dear detective, come in and we'll have some tea."

* * *

Mer had lain in bed for two days. She couldn't eat and wouldn't sleep. To make it all worst, her brother hadn't come to visit, and she heard him speaking with their father in the hallway: "She's a little brat. She's throwing a tantrum and she's too old for that to be cute."

Her grandmother had the theory Mer had finally fallen in love. Bruno snorted: "She's too self-centered for that."

Yet, she didn't blame Bruno, no -she blamed that blasted Chinese crossdresser. Anger was good, at least it got her out of bed. She looked at her reflection and thought she looked dreadful. The gal in the mirror said: _'What do you expected after two days of crying your heart out?' _Mer nodded and answered:_ 'I'm done with that, and purposeless anger is no good either. That little man doesn't know what he's up against. I'm getting revenge. I'm making him beg for it and then I'm leaving him weeping with his butt on the sidewalk.'_

She had convinced three ex's, beefy and not too smart, to act as her wrath's instrument. D was meaner than his flowery kimonos presaged. He had finished the guys without breaking a sweat. Mer had to eat a couple of pints of chocolate ice-cream before she calmed down enough to realize that revenge is a plate best served cold. She thought: _'OK, time to change strategy. It's my fault really, you don't send a guy to do a gal's job. There's always a short-cut to get under anyone's skin. I just need to find what this bastard's is.'_

The answer came after a few days of stake-out outside the Pet Shop: Sweet. That man was eating enough sweet to give himself a diabetic comma. Mer smiled: _'Well, I'm giving him the final shove.'_

Count D was a real gourmet, he liked his desserts exotic and expensive. One can't spurge on a vendetta, so Mer had seduced the M's Hotel confectioner chef. Turns out she was quite the muse; the guy felt inspired and created the Mercedes' silver wings. The name was corny and the chef was too clingy, but the dessert promised to be good and Mer put up with the guy until he came up with a prototipe.

She was ready to rumble. She dressed for the kill, picked up the small rose and white box and left for the battlefield. D didn't seem happy to see her back at his door.

'_Good, let the bastard suffer.'_ She strived to look innocent, not an easy task considering the outfit she was wearing, and said: "I'm so sorry for my behavior the last time we met. It was lamentable; so I brought this to make amends."

His nostrils flapped and she could swear he had moaned.

'_Got you!'_

He was pouring jasmine tea in a delicate cup when Mer made her move: "I'm thinking of getting me a pet… Any suggestions?" She lowered her eyes, uncrossed her long legs, stretched them, kick out one of her sandals and stopped with her naked foot a few inches from his.

He was looking at her face with a creepy smile; the smile made her tremble and not all of it was fear. "Well, Miss…"

"Yeah right, we haven't been properly introduced. You may call me Mer, all my friends do."

"Then Miss Mer, I fear my shop is unable to meet your requirements."

"Oh, I'm very easy to please."

"Still, I don't think we cater what you crave. In fact, I see no reason to make you lose your time. I think it is best that you leave."

He had taken her by the arm and escorted her out the door.

Mer stood befuddle on the sidewalk, holding one sandal in her hand and tried to process what had just happened: _'He kicked me out! That freak kicked me out from his lousy shop.'_ She tore her dress and was ready to shout: Rape! When she thought it better: _'He probably doesn't like girls. I mean, with the way he looks, no one would doubt it. That's the only logical explanation.'_

Again she bumped into the blond.

Leo didn't recognized her. He just saw the torn dress and asked: "Miss, are you alright?"

Mer recognized him, saw the candy boxes he was carrying and yelled: "Get away from me! You disgusting fag," while she ran away.

Leo shook his head as he entered the Pet Shop: "D, you surround yourself with basket cases. That chick is wacko. What's her problem?"

Count D sighed: "I really don't think even she knows. I just hope she doesn't become my problem."

* * *

Mer was beside herself. She couldn't believe she had actually found an insurmountable obstacle. She wasn't one to give up, though. She paced up and down her bedroom, thinking: _'There has to be something this guy wants that I can give, something I can use as leverage. I just have to find out what it is.'_

The answer came by chance and by the happy circumstance she had been playing stake-out outside his door day and night for a couple of weeks. One night the Count came out wearing a flowing dark robe. He had left his shop through the window and his dark silhouette appeared briefly against the full moon. Then he started jumping on the rooftops like some crazy martial arts movie. There was no chance of following him without a helicopter, so she waited. Mer was falling asleep inside her car. She decided to go out and she waited trembling in the cold till he came back. The dawn was playing in Technicolor when he finally did and the answer to the conundrum was dripping from the corner of his lips.

When she came back home her house was in an upheaval. Her parents were hysteric and her brother was angry beyond words. Well, no quite beyond words, as soon as she crossed the door he began interrogating her: "Where have you been? Why didn't you phone?"

"Oh, so now you're interested in me again. What happened? Did your precious pooch elope with a stray?"

"Mer, we were worried."

Bruno did look worried and Mer loved him, so she answered trying to lie as little as reasonably possible: "I went to see a friend. But he was out and I waited for him. I lost track of the time and he didn't show up until dawn."

He looked at her: "Are you ok?"

Mer shrugged: "I'm fine. It's nothing serious," she signaled the bump in the head she had gotten hitting the door's lintel when she had seen what Count D really was: "I just need some sleep." After a little convincing, he let her go.

Mer's head was too full with thoughts to allow for disconnection. She turned around and around in her bed. Finally, she fixed her eyes on the girl in the mirror and asked: _'Why do you want to do this? And spare me the revenge crap. You want revenge, then go pay someone to torch the place and be done with it. This is dangerous. So then: why are you doing this?'_

Her reflection answered: _'I don't know. But I'm going through with it. I'm not a quitter.'_

At least in that she was right, she never knew when to quit. The night she went to confront the blood-drinking Count, she didn't bother with fancy dresses. She wore her oldest jeans and her favorite t-shirt, the one with a kitten lying on the beach that said Copurrtone.

She knocked the door feeling like a sleepwalker.

He answered the door opening but at crack and said: "If you come to apologize again, I graciously accept."

He held his hand out, awaiting for the cake he thought Mer had brought. But this time there was no gift. He was closing the door on her nose when Mer slip a foot and prevented him from doing it. Still, he didn't ask her in. Mer went to the quick: "I'm not here to apologize. I'm here to talk about your little drinking problem."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I think you do. I also think the cops might be interested to know about it. I mean, with all the weird murders that've been going on lately. And then there's also the Inquirer. I bet that'd be a good cover."

He didn't answer but let her in. While he poured a cup of jasmine tea he said: "So tell me, Miss Mer. What is it that you want?"

"For starters, a cup of coffee. I hate tea."

He stood up and went to the kitchen.

Mer grabbed the knife he had used to cut the cake, it was really pointy. She bit her lip and half closed her eyes while she cut the crook of her arm. She cut deep and the blood started dripping down to her hand. The shop's creatures went wild.

"What do you think you're doing?" he came back wearing an apron and a terrified look on his face.

She walked towards him.

He took a backwards step.

Mer licked the crook of her arm and said: "It's really sweet. I think it would be rude to let it spill on the carpet."

He stood there like a deer blinded by the front lights of a truck.

Mer kept walking towards D and when she reached him, she said: "Care for a taste?"

His eyes evened into a dark blue when he went for her arm. He started suckling and Mer had to lean against him. Oh my, under the kimono he was definitely male. He made his way to her throat. She let her head fall backwards and she let her hand hung from her side. The blood was staining the floor and the beasties were restless.

He smelled like incense. Once more Mer was feeling dizzy. She breathed in and looked around. They weren't alone. The weirdest crowd had walked in. Under other circumstances Mer may have not minded, but now she ordered curtly: "Out!"

He agreed. He carried her down a long hallway, far longer than was possible in a small shop nested between two buildings in a corner of Chinatown. He stopped in front of a door and opened it. They were on the shore of a big pond. He laid her against a weeping willow, took off her shirt and unclasped her bra. He was taking off the kimono while Mer wondered how a pond could fit inside the little shop. But she got distracted when he went for her breast. Mer was now bleeding from her neck, arm and chest.

She was emptying on the grass, but he was filling her elsewhere so she didn't complain. He kissed her and she tasted her own copper in his mouth. She gasped and the world went blank. She was floating. She actually was above them both. She felt a flutter of fear and shook her mane. She knew she was dying.

"Such a pity" she told him while she rubbed her snout against his cheek, "you might have been the only one I'd have let lock me inside a stall."

He looked back at her and caressed her long neck. His eyes were back to normal: "Look at what you've made me do."

She neighed: "There are no regrets."

She was beating her hoofs in retreat when he grabbed her by the hind leg and brought her down. It was cold and it hurt. She snorted flapping her lips and kicked. She wasn't staying in that particular stall.

He hushed her and with a pass of his hand, like a magician taking out a rabbit from a hat, he produced a flute out from thin air. No sound came out of it when he blew it. But Mer heard a buzzing. She looked around and saw it was coming from a cloud of dragonflies. She kicked harder, trying to leave the body where she was trapped. She was terrified of bugs.

He laid her on her side, took her leg and passed it over his hips. Then he placed one of his legs between hers. She felt him gently nuzzling her nape while he entered her again. The dragonflies were swarming around them, arching their abdomens, hitting them with their appendages. Dragonflies may look pretty, but they are carnivores and they have mandibles that bite. Still the little bugs didn't bite nearly as hard as he could.

They were covered by a sea of blue and green heart shaped couples. She screamed, just a small part of it was from pain. When the dragonflies were gone, only D remained. He dressed, picked up something from the grass and left the pond closing the door.

* * *

Detective Orcot was having tea at D's again: "So the girl has been missing for a week. The family suspects a new boy she was seeing, though they have no idea of who he might be. Plus she has a long list of ex-boyfriends. It's not going to be easy to rule them all out. Isn't it weird that the brother was a costumer of yours? I even remember seeing her here a couple of times."

"I've already told you all I know. This is clearly a case of Kamikakushi."

"Yeah sure, she was spirited away."

D kept dusting the bronze sculpture that was hanging over the coffee table.

Orcot looked up: "That's ugly. Who puts something like that right over the food. A horse pursued by flies."

"She is a mare; those are dragonflies and they are frolicking."

Leo shrugged, the mare did seem happy. But he hated when D was right so he said: "Frolicking? Who uses words like that anymore? Whatever. The point is that those are bugs and bugs are disgusting."

"You, detective, are a heathen. Devil horses are the very epitome of what wild beauty means." D sat down and hid a knowing smile by taking a sip from his tea cup.

_**AN: Yikes! This is way out of my comfort zone. The first part I can sort of live with. It's classic really, them Greeks and them Romans had their girls turning into spiders, shrubbery and eerie voices in caves, so: why not horses? It's not even that questionable. Hell! I read The Little Mermaid at age seven and that gal turned into foam because she didn't want to stab her ex lover. Now, the weird matting bugs part… I'm not so sure about. I'm not even sure where that's coming from. But I suspect it's courtesy of an illustrated how-to-do that refers to a certain posture as the dragonfly. Further more, the exhibitionism surprises even me. Why am I posting something like this?! Still, it's my hell spawn, so I take full responsibility.  
**__**Now about dragonflies (epipoctra), which are actually a different species **__**from devil's horses -also known as damselflies- (zygoptera). Sure they might look pretty, but they are fierce predators with jaws that can break their prey in two. Their abdomen has eleven segments and when they mate they make a heart-like shape because the reproductive organs of the female are in the eight segment and the male's are in the second, hence the acrobatics. Nature is not romantic, but we humans are; and that's why we make haikus about them and end up calling a bug in its nymph state a Naiad (greek nymphs who presided over rivers). If you actually care to learn more about dragonflies, damselflies and Odonata in general, take a look at the Texas A&M University's page or the Slater Museum of Natural history.  
**_

_**Mercurial Weather  
Curses or Comments? Please, feel free to read and review.**_


	2. Deceptive

_Eyesight is deceitful. With these Twins D might have to gauge his eyes out to be able to see the truth._

_**Foreword: **__**Another Pet Shop of Horrors. I know… I'm obsessive, but at least I'm consistent. This one is blameless. Well, not really, but I can't drop the guilt on anyone's lap other than mine.  
Warning: 1) the T rating is here for a reason but so are you, and the title does mention horror. 2) I'm aware Matsuri Akino is the rightful owner of this puppy, this is meant as homage. Enjoy.**_

Pet Shop of Horrors

Deceptive

"_Anything with scales counts as a fish." Malayan Proverb_

_"All around the mulberry bush,  
The monkey chased the weasel.  
The monkey stopped to scratch his nose  
Pop! goes the weasel." Anonymous nursery rhyme._

Twin drops separated at birth, that's a sorry cliché if you've ever heard one. But the reason some phrases become clichés is because they are often true. In the Rüzgârin sister's case that was eerily so.

One couldn't think about Tab –Tabitha- without Hab –Habibi- or the other way around. That one had decided to come to the world with two bodies. That might seem wasteful, but souls work in mysterious ways and efficiency is not part of that equation.

Physically there was no way of telling them apart, not even their mother could. In all fairness, the women barely had a chance to know them. She was hit by a bus when the girls turned one. It might have been an accident.

Their father was always away and the coming of the twins had given him no reason to change that. He had married his high school sweetheart to spite his overbearing mother and the sole act of rebellion of his life had backfired. The sweet little wallpaper flower he'd married turned into a pathologically jealous bitch that dug her claws hard in a man who was already tired of having a dominant woman in his life. Still, the twins' father was too stubborn to admit defeat –he had inherited that from the mother he hated- so the man had been trapped for seven years in an unhappy marriage by the time the twins were born. Giving him an heir was the last desperate attempt of his wife to tie him down. But when instead of the promised heir, two defective girls were born; the man saw no reason to change his habits. And hence, he had seen the twins just a couple of times when his plane had crashed.

The twins didn't notice any difference when they became orphans. They were being raised by their elderly grandmother. Not even in her youth had Madame Rüzgârin been mother material and time had done nothing to change that. When she was raising her only child she had been distant; now she was unapproachable, good thing the girls didn't seem to be in want of a mom.

From the very beginning Tab and Hab had only needed each other. They were spit out by their cursing mother in such a tangle that they had been thought to be siamese. That hadn't been the case, they were almost perfect. Their parents were recovering from the lie an eager young doctor had cried out before fainting when the real blow had fallen. The girls were blind. While the eminence, that had been deemed the only one worthy of attending the delivery of a Rüzgârin baby, was trying to cover the faux pas of one of the toady residents in his retinue and sooth the susceptibilities of the son of one of the greatest contributors to the hospital's funds; the pediatrician, who was too young to be an eminence but was a competent physician, had examined the girls and discovered they had no eyeballs whatsoever.

Their mother was still getting use to the idea when they went and gave her the final rejection: they wouldn't suckle from her. You might think it's impossible to feel unwanted by two pieces of meat barely one day old. You'd be wrong. The message was loud and clear we don't need or want you. So by the time the woman was run by the bus all that was dragged for a couple of blocks, was a shell that'd been empty for almost a year. Nobody believed the driver that he hadn't seen the woman pushing the stroller –which miraculously survived the accident intact. The doubts were justified since the accident had occurred in broad daylight. But anyone who knew the twins' mom could have said that since her daughters were born, the woman had been almost invisible.

Nevertheless, we shouldn't judge the Rüzgârin sisters too harshly. The destruction of their father's hopes and the rejection of their mother hadn't been an act of conscious cruelty. It was just the way they were made. Together they made something perfect and whole. The only thing they could not face was been separated. That's why they had been born without eyes, the outside world had little to offer compared to the wonders of their inner world. That's also why they had refused their mother's breast. It wasn't personal, they were almost self-sufficient. Almost is the key word here. They had been starving till a crafty nurse came up with a way of bottle-feeding them simultaneously. They learnt to take in what they needed from the outside world, gorging while holding hands and feet.

There's no doubt that the nurse was crafty and smarter than the bunch of doctors that had come to try to decipher the twins. She had further improved their life by suggesting they were kept in a single cradle. And they grew stronger and stronger, sleeping in a bundle in which you couldn't distinguish whose extremity belonged to whom. The girls felt no need to figure that out until the day their mother died.

Probably from her lack of experience in the matter, Madame Rüzgârin felt such closeness was not healthy. So she had picked up Hab and taken her to what had been her father's cradle. The girls wailed in stereo non-stop for the next eight hours.

Rezza Rüzgârin was a strong-headed woman that had survived through a couple of wars and two loveless marriages. She wasn't going to let those defective rugrats dictate what she could or couldn't do in her home. She would have kept then apart till they had died crying out if she hadn't broken her hip after menacing the girls with throwing them out the window if they kept wailing like that.

It was a bad break, even with nails and bolts she could never hope to walk again. The terrified doctors stalled as much as they could but in the end they delivered the bad news and sent Rezza home. She wasn't one to cave in even in that situation. Stubbornness ran in the genes. But after three days of crying and bad mojo, she was ready to reconsider. A cook had lost three teeth after spitting on the babies bottles cursing the little rats for refusing to eat. The chauffer had driven the Mercedes into the pool and nearly drowned after telling the maid -with whom he cheated his wife- that someone ought to drown the annoying kids in a bucket. What had tilted the scale as far as Rezza was concerned, was that one of the maids had gone missing.

That maid was not only an unrepentant adulter, she was also a cold-hearted bitch who had left two babies freezing in their stroller so she could go fornicate with the chauffer behind the bushes. If the butler hadn't found them, the girls might have died. Anyway, before the search party Rezza had organized as soon as she came back from the hospital could find the maid almost dead cold, locked inside the meat freezer which was a memory of the days when Madame Rüzgârin still received company; Rezza had given up. She couldn't admit this to anyone, not even to herself, so she came up with a compromise solution that left everybody unhappy.

The Twins were the ones responsible for everything that had happened. They were the ones who had bedridden her. She knew this with her innermost heart, which she had inherited from a gipsy relative she never mentioned. And, since they liked best to be left alone, she was going to let the little pest keep her company. Of course that meant she had to put up with them, she would cope as long as the Twins couldn't.

It had been into the midst of this Cold War that the first nanny had arrived. She was a seasoned soldier in the rearing up war, so it only took her two days to turn her tail and flee from that mad house. That had been the precise moment the nanny counterdance had begun.

* * *

Like most children, the Twins grew up fast the first few years. They left behind clothes, shoes and useless caretakers. But when they reached the age of eight, they seemed to stop. It was odd and it wasn't, looking at a 4'43'' adult was unsettling, especially since she had four empty eyes that probed you from two faces. But somehow that seemed about right. That's what they were supposed to be. As an eerie twosome they could still be swallowed. Had they merged into one they would have been horrifying.

Hab had started talking with whole sentences and proper pronunciation when she was two. Her fluty voice explaining complex thoughts and concepts that were light years beyond her age, was like hearing ghoul's nails on a blackboard. Tab was nearly mute; she only commented or highlighted what her sister said, usually with monosyllables, and yet, she hummed and singed in perfect key. Tab devoured books one after another until her little fingertips turned into spatulas. Hab had never learnt to read but she could sculpt what her hands told her about the world her blind eyes couldn't see. They filled each other's holes like a jigsaw puzzle. The only thing they both did was play the piano. And even that they did after their own fashion. Tab was the right hand and Hab was the left, they used the spares to hold each other while playing.

The idea of teaching them Braille had come from an entrepreneuring nanny that had actually stayed for a whole month back when the girls were three and a half. She had thought they were older and didn't attended school because of their "especial needs". And she had offered to teach both of them to read. Hab had declined politely saying only her sister needed to learn. When the nanny had tried to impose her viewpoints forcibly, a chandelier fell on her head.

Even with Rezza's resilience those two were too much to handle, the poor woman had picked up the bottle after the Twin's fourth birthday party. Back then, Madame Rüzgârin was still trying to convince herself (and the few social contacts she still cared for) that things could be normal. Every year on the Twin's birthday she had filled the house with rent-a-day playmates, mostly the children of the employees from her second husband's factory. The day the Twins turned four, the illusion of normalcy seemed to be working. That is, until a little brute had started picking on Tab. Hab had tried reasoning with the foul child, but that requires that both parties are actually capable of reason. The little brute lacked that ability and, by the end of the day, he was also missing an eye. He had stumbled on the same branch he had used to hit Hab.

Of course the Twins were not to blame -all the grownups agreed on that. It had been a sad accident, but from that day on, no kid could be persuaded to come back to play. The Twins didn't seem to mind. They did preferred solitude, or rather being alone together. That's why forcing them to live in Rezza's room had been a stroke of genius. They deeply resented the situation. But what little satisfaction Madame Rüzgârin could have gotten out of it was dampened by the fact she was forced to live with them in close quarters. The rest of the dampening came courtesy of six years old Cognac.

She had feared for her liver, oddly enough her liver held; what was killing her was a kidney condition. Drowning in your own filth does nothing for a person's good spirits. As the sickness progressed Rezza Rüzgârin turned more and more bitter.

One evening at dinner, Madame Rüzgârin had stopped trying to eat and picked up the meat knife from her tray, her own smell nauseated her. While she held it to the light of her bed lamp, turning it with her pudgy fingers and trying to find the spot she thought she had seen, a thought came to her head. Tab and Hab dropped their spoons in unison and decided it was time to leave.

The Twins didn't need the light so they waited until Rezza had started snoring the bedtime booze. They didn't need to pack either, all that they wanted they took with them. They didn't leave a note; they saw no reason to do that, they knew they weren't going to be missed. So they left the house without a backwards glance though they had nowhere else to go. That took care of itself when a truck almost ran them over.

The truck had skid and hit a gas station blowing up half a block. It was a small block, filled with warehouse, so there were barely no human casualties. Still, the property damages were enough to bring the firesquad . But, by the time the firemen arrived, the Twins had already been spotted by the first officer on the scene. He was a homicide detective and had been there following the trail of a bank robber who had upgraded to murdered by killing a cashier in his latest job. The guy had rushed to try to save the truck driver and had noticed the girls because he was attuned to the bizarre. His name was Leon Orcot.

* * *

"Why me? I'm with homicides and I already have to take care of my little bro," protested Leo. No good action goes unpunished. He had gotten involved trying to save a guy's life. There was still not way of knowing if the truck driver was going to make it and he had got stuck with two eerie looking kids, who -in all probability- had caused the accident in the first place.

"At this hour we can't contact the child protection services and they can't stay in the precinct." Even if they could the Chief wouldn't want them to. Those kids gave him the creeps and he had been a cop in Chinatown for thirty years.

"Why not Jill? She's a girl… sort of."

"What do you mean with "sort of", Orcot? I'm a girl. And why should being female matter?" said Jill throwing Leo a warning look that said: you'd better think carefully before you answer.

Leo, as usual, missed the look and, scratching his chin, he said: "Uh… you know… you are like programmed for that. And you, being such a big tomboy, should grab at the chance of having some practice."

Jill did, kick box practice. But before she could kick Leo's butt, the chief yelled and ordered her to go back to filing the reports that were pilling up in her desk. He then ordered Leon to leave.

* * *

When Leo had gone to pick up Chris from D's he wasn't alone, the Twins were with him. He could have dealt with the ride to Chinatown if they had been completely silent, but one of them was humming and whispering a punch line that sounded awfully like "right back at you" to the tune of Pop said the Weasel. The other just tapped her fingers and Leo could have sworn she was watching him from her vacated sockets.

"Where have you been? It's awfully late. I had to sent Chris to bed. He was so worried. May I remind you that my shop is not a daycare center. If you intend to raise this child properly, you have to learn to be more responsible..."

It was bad enough that he had an ambiguous relationship with the owner of a Pet Shop that was almost certainly the cover of all sort of illegal activities, but when D started acting like this Leo just didn't know how to feel about it. He blinked confuse and interrupted D's diatribe: "Uh…I… actually there are these two girls…"

Count D looked disgusted: "Detective, please spare me the tale of your…roof runs."

"No... It's not like that at all. They are still in the car."

D flinched in surprised horror and then pushed Leo towards the door: "Then you shouldn't keep them waiting."

"Is this where we are staying?" Hab's piccolo sang behind Leo's back.

"How did you get out? I left the child lock on." As soon as he said that the fender fell from his car. "What the…?"

"Detective! Don't curse in front of a lady." He was looking at Hab and Tab with his mismatched eyes. Then he said in the tone he reserved for his premium clientele: "Come in, please," as he shoved Leo out of the way.

Hab and Tab nodded gracefully and Hab said: "Thank you for receiving us in your…?"

"Pet Shop," said D finishing her sentence.

Hab smiled sweetly: "Of course, Pet Shop." The Twin's looked each other and giggled. That giggle made Leo want to run for the hills.

As an afterthought D remembered him: "You might as well stay too. It's almost dawn. You can sleep in the couch."

"No blankie?" Leo shouted, but D and the Twins were already gone.

Leo looked at his watch, quarter past three; he could still catch a couple of hours of sleep before having to go to work. To add injury to insult, Leo had to sleep on the carpet, T-chan was using the couch.

He was woken by the noise of breakfast being served. Chris was at the coffee table, laughing good-heartedly with the spooky pair and an assortment of pups. Leo was about to protest about having animals around while eating when D's coo-coo chimed eight o'clock. Christ! He was running late. He nodded a reluctant good morning at D, grabbed a muffin, messed up Chris' hair and ran out. He was out of Chinatown when it hit him. How on earth could a mute boy make himself understood by a couple of blind girls?

* * *

Pon-chan was usually very protective of Chris, some may even say jealous, but this time she kept her distance.

"Not as dumb as I thought you were, kiddo," T-chan sniggered.

"Don't worry, this people can seem weird but they are really swell," said Chris giving the Twins an encouraging smile.

Hab and Tab looked at the small crowd around the table and then at Chris: "People?"

"Yeah, is just like a family," said Chris with a big smile while reaching for the same cookie Tab wanted. He touched Tab's hand and blushed. He tried to pull it away but Tab held his hand and looked intently at his palm. Then she whispered in her sister's ear something about new souls in the Karma wheel.

Both girls laughed and Hab asked: "How old are you?"

He went purple and blurted: "Six."

The silence had gone on for a while when Pon-chan butted in: "Let's play hide and seek. You two can hide." _'Maybe we'll get lucky and you'll get lost'_, the little badger thought.

T-chan, who -like any self-respecting Totetsu- couldn't be fooled by appearances, muttered shaking his head: "Nope, my first impression was right. That badger is dumb."

Hab and Tab stood up smiling sweetly: "It's not fair. We are newcomers. Let Chris play in our team."

Pon-chan couldn't think of a good reason to say no.

Chris, Tab and Hab ran in a quail line down the Pet Shop's endless hallways. Chris was between the Twins. How could Hab run like that without seen? Before he could figure it out, a wall was coming at them with terrifying speed. Chris could only shut his eyes close, push Habibi out of harm's way and brace himself for the impact. The girls grabbed him by his t-shirt and made him jump. They had somehow missed the wall. And they were someplace dark, warm and a bit smelly, like the inside of a pocket. Chris opened his eyes and asked: "Where are we?"

"Inside," answered Hab. He wanted to ask some more but Tab put a finger over his lips. She began humming. Chris knew the song but couldn't remember the name. He felt sleepy and blacked out lulled by the girl's voice.

When he woke up they were out in the hallway, Hab explained to him it was time to go back. They walked leasurely and still made it in time to the safe point. There was no sign of Pon-chan or T-chan. They didn't appear until tea time. Pon-chan's white dress was covered in mud and her hair was a rat's nest.

"What happened?" Chris asked.

Pon-chan glared resentfully at the Twins but just said: "We got lost," before going for her biscuits and dipping them in her milk. From then on, she was very careful of staying out of the Twin's way.

* * *

In the Rüzgârin manor the Twin's absence had been noticed and received with a certain amount of relief. Until someone felt compelled to point out they should probably call the police. I mean, the kids where Madame's heirs and they were underaged. But no one dared do it without their Mistress' compliance. And that meant they needed to wake her up.

Rezza was not an early bird and her hangovers were legendary, so the servants draw sticks among the lowest ranks and a propitiatory lamb was chosen. After Madame Rüzgârin had finished picking her teeth on the poor sap; she said there was no need to involve the police. They had to think of the family's good name. She said she would call an old friend.

The friend was actually a former lover. She had started seeing him when her first marriage took a turn for the worst. Her husband had the nasty habit of raising his hand at her. The friend had been initially employed to take care of that. Madame had been interested in more than a professional relationship. At first he had refused her advances, but it turns out that he was just zealous. He lived by his own coda, but when the job was done, he felt happy to oblige. They found out they were both predators and sort of soulmates, what little soul they had. They kept it up while Rezza married her second. The friend had cleared the field when she got pregnant of the boy she needed to secure her position as Mistress of the household.

He was old and had retired, but his boy, the pride and joy of his old age, would be happy to take the job. He was even willing to give her a discount price for old times sake. They were a continent away so it would take his boy a day to get there, and he needed to rest so make that two. Rezza would wait, you can't rush the Reaper. He always arrives on the dot.

* * *

"So there's no missing child report which fits the girl's description?" Leo was at the phone, tappig his fingers impatiently while the voice on the other side of the line confirmed what it had just said.

Either no one had noticed or the girls were being abandoned purposefully, seeing them you couldn't very well blame the family. Even the government seemed to agree. After a brief interview with the social worker the woman remembered a prior appointment. She left saying that since the girls seemed so well adjusted to the Pet Shop they could stay there for the time being. Then she had thought that the little horrors fitted right into that Chinaman's freak show. The woman couldn't wait to run to her car. Her nerves had been in such a mess she had driven it right into a hydrant.

The only one who was enjoying Tab and Hab's company was Chris. And Leo was beginning to wonder if D was a good influence and if his little brother actually needed to attend a special school. What was really odd was that the Twins were enjoying Chris' company too. Pon-chan was moody and T-chan was having a ball.

* * *

Hab was pummeling Chris on the chessboard. He had trouble understanding the rules: "Is that allowed Tab?"

The Twins loved that he could tell them apart, still Tab had a deeply ingrained sense of fairness, so she nodded while her sister said: "Check mate."

Chris looked at the board, down-hearted, trying to figure out how he had managed to lose in two movements.

Tab tugged at her sister's sleeve and Hab sighed: "How about we play checkers?"

Chris lighted up and they played, they even let him win a couple of games just to see him smile.

After lunch, they were sent out to buy Chinese bellflower, Silver Needles and Lung Chi tea. Hab was explaining Chris how different brands of tea were made from the same plant with different processing when Tab stopped cold.

Hab looked at her sister, she sniffed and whispered: "Mixed blood."

Tab nodded.

"What?" Chris was looking inquiringly at them.

A car stopped nearby and a man in black clothes and dark glasses descended. There was nothing they could do with the boy around. He could get hurt, their power was a loose canon.

Chris wasn't stupid, he felt the danger coming from the guy too, so when Hab cried out: "Run!" He did.

They ran as fast as they could but they ended up in a dead ally. The steps of the hitman sounded behind them. There was no time for kindness, Tab banged Chris' head against a dumpster and Hab shoved him through it and hid him under the garbage. Then the Twins went inside the brick wall holding hands.

"Where are those brats?" the man in black growled under his breath.

Shrilly laughter came from the walls: "So she has sent forth a hunter and now you have to bring her back our heart? There's no point in pleading for mercy, is there? Mixed bloods feel no compassion."

The voice came from the left but the song was coming from the right. He stood there looking from one side to the other, pointing his gun at thin air. A trash can's lid fell down and the man fired his gun at it. While he was distracted, the Twins jumped out from the wall and joined hands through the man's neck. They went solid and the man hit the floor with a loud tud, gasping for the air his crushed throat could not longer let in. While the hitman was lying on the floor, the Twins pulled out their claws with a sinister smile on their faces. When they began feeding, the man didn't even have a chance to scream.

Yet Rezza could swear she had heard him. She knew he had failed and that he was dead. For a moment she feared what her old friend might do to her when he found out. Then she laughed, thinking that she was kidding herself. She was going to be dead way before the man could get on a plane. She heard them singing: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" while she lost her grip on the world.

* * *

D and Leo found Chris underneath a heap of banana peels, eggshells and assorted garbage. He was blessedly unconscious, lying meters away from what could have once been human remains and was now a bloody mass not even a mother would recognize.

Leo had lied to his brother and told him the Twins had gone home and were fine. Who knows? It might not have been a lie at all. And, until the CSI lab said otherwise, he was sticking to that story. Only prob was that Chris wasn't buying. Leo had taken him to the movies and back at the apartment he bought pizza and ice-cream. All the while the kid had tried to appear calmed, but, as soon as he thought Leon had fallen asleep, he had started crying, pressing his face to his pillow so as not to make a sound. Leo was pretending too, he wasn't asleep. Actually, he passed a sleepless night, impotently listening to his little brother crying, with his hands balled up in fists, right until his knuckles turned white.

* * *

The next night D was woken up by a knock on his door. He let them in smiling: "So you came back."

Hab let out a bitter laugh: "Your zoo is as good as any other, we have nowhere else to go."

"Oh, but Miss Rüzgârin, you have it all wrong."

"So you know."

"Nights can be long, sometimes I read the obituaries."

"Shall we leave?" Hab stood up but Tab remained sited.

"Your sister knows, Habibi, that this is not a zoo. It has never been. I've aspired to make it a safe haven and, with a little good will, it can become a home."

If Hab had tears, she would have cried. The Twins followed him down the hallways until they reached a door. They entered a barren landscape of gold and white, mounts of red-golden hair were raising from the sand. Twosomes, threesomes and even some quintuplets rised up to salute them; their voices carried by the gale force wind. They were kin, sib. The Twins were home.

* * *

Leo looked carefully over his shoulder towards the garden where Chris was playing with Pon-chan and T-chan. Who knows what D had told him to calm him down. But it had worked and Leo didn't want to mess it up, so he said to D in voice barely above a whisper: "There's no trace of them. The… uh… leftovers were the tug's. And their grandma is dead; forensics says that she died from natural causes. The old lady's corpse was in a fairly advanced state of decomposition, though the servants swear they had just seen her yesterday morning. The chief suspects that they hid the old lady's dead and tried to get rid of the kids so they could cash in on the inheritance. There's no way of proving it, but I sort of agree with him. When that kind of dough is involved, people are willing to do all sorts of nasty stuff. Still, who puts a hit on an eight year old?"

"There are some very wicked people out there, Detective." D shrugged and poured him some more tea.

Leo had found out that right after leaving the police academy, but that was not something he liked to dwell in. He looked away from D's piercing eyes and noticed a leathery snout coming out from the soft soil under the begonias. To change the subject he said: "You have a mole problem, D."

"Those are not moles, Detective, those are very rare carnivorous marsupials," D neglected to say they were an endangered species. Even in his current state, Leo wouldn't pass on a chance for closing his shop. Poor Detective Orcot had a single-track mind.

"Well, they sure look like regular moles to me," Leo pointed out stubbornly. And, as if to prove him wrong, the thing came out in plain sunlight, grabbed a lizard from the garden's wall and started munching on it while the creature still kicked.

_**No, wait, I have it. I do have someone to blame for this story: Mishima's "Confess**_**_ions of a Mask" the whole growing up with a dying granny in a single room gave me the creeps. Hope it does the same for you.  
Silver Needles is a pricy Chinese white tea and Lung Chi is a green tea which were once considered fit for the Imperial family. They are made after a lengthy manual process from the first blooms of the tea plant in the Fujian and Zhejiang region in China. They are especially good for taking them with desserts and I think those would be D's favorites.  
I th_****_ink Rezza has dingo blood. Oh, and the girls surname is Turkish and means wind force. And, j__ust in case you wonder what marsupial is D holding in his bag: they are __marsupial moles. These odd Australian desert marsupials are basically indistinguishable from placental moles from the outside and are often quoted as an example of convergent evolution. But by now you should know better than to let that deceive you. They are not even the same species. They are also endangered; guess that's where the jinx thing comes from (unlucky becomes something that gives bad luck, endangered becomes dangerous) so look it up in UNEP WCMC, awareness may eventually lead to action._**

**_Mercurial Weather.  
__Curses or Comments? Critic helps improve ppl, and I do believe I'm not hopeless_**


	3. Detour

_Alexander knew lust__ was damning him; he embraced it and thought he didn't need a Chinese cross-dresser to preach him back to the right path. He was in for a surprise._

_**Foreword: Yup another one of Count D's, I'm crazy abo**__**ut him. I blame this story on Red. You know what's your sin, so suck it up, Hon. The rest are warned that this is rated M. After all, it comes from a spiteful gal's sick imagination, you do the math. Still, I love Matsuri Akino's work and would never do anything really questionable to it, the least of all in the name of revenge. Anyhow, if you are squeamish…run. Oh, and I don't know why I claim this happens in San Francisco, but I think it does. Somehow I feel that if one day you're walking around Nob Hill – among the foggy bugambilia riddle mansions and fancy hotels – if you make the wrong turn –or, perhaps, the right turn- you'll end up in Chinatown and find D's Pet Shop. I've heard some people saying it's L.A. but I sincerely doubt it. And, sorry Herb Caen, but I like the word Frisco and I'm not afraid to use it – tourist and rube that I am. I do love the City, though, so I guess that counts as attenuating circumstance doesn't it?**_

Pet Shop of Horrors

Detour

"_Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell." Joan Crawford._

Alexander Flüstern-Lügen could make Casanova blush and leave the room. His name was banned from some of the town's best and worst houses. In Frisco that's a big deal. And, just like Casanova, he seemed focused on quantity over quality. That's not to say that he wasn't discriminating, but he wasn't picky either. If you breathed and were gorgeous or quaint, you fitted his bill. If you also had bad luck, you caught his attention an ended up being another mark in his bedpost.

The night Alex met his destiny, had began just as any other night. He had just finished corrupting a plain vanilla catholic schoolgirl. The girl was the daughter of a guy who'd always looked down nose at him in the Yacht Club. One day, early in the morning, Alex had woken up rocking to the rhythm of his boat with a killer headache, trying to remember the name of the girl sleeping beside him. Thanks to his habit of tipping generously, he had managed to keep the exact location of his dock a secret. That was the reason why the two avengers that had come to find him weren't able to do so. Through the haziness of a hangover, which a couple of aspirins couldn't fight back, he had overheard two men talking. One of them -the asshole who had fathered the mousy schoolgirl- was telling the other –who was the father of the girl whose name Alex couldn't remember- that the whole mess was his own fault for not imposing discipline in his home. Only a scatterbrain would fall for the cheap conqueror tactics of the kind that low-breed eurotrash could come up with.

Given the choice of remaining hidden or facing head-on a couple of burly brutes, which could only end up with he getting beaten or having to do some explaining to the police, Alex had taken the path of least resistance. Nevertheless, he had enough pride left in him for that to vex him. In fact, Alexander had been so furious that he nearly got arrested for driving his conspicuous cherry red Alpha Romeo Spider at murderous speed down Marina Boulevard. So the small lived affair with the catholic schoolgirl had been spiced with the sweet flavor of revenge. But once another scatterbrain had bitten the dust, he began to lose interest. Even if his cheap conqueror tricks had convinced the schoolgirl to do some things that her father had made her swore on the Bible she'd never do, she was too sweet for his taste. And he began craving something more exotic to wipe the aftertaste off his mouth.

Alex kicked the girl out, after giving her cab fair and his best regards to her dad. He left the rest to the doorman, who was used to consoling hysterical girls and who didn't really mind thanks to the generous bonus Alex gave him every month. Then Alexander pulled his tux out from the closet, took a quick shower and dragged his carcass to one of Grace Maximilian's parties. She was notorious for hosting some of the wildest, most refined soirees you could ever hope to see since Caligula stopped receiving company. That is, if you were the kind who hopes for that sort of thing.

Well, there's nothing new under the sun; or the halogen lights for that matter. He had seen it all twice or thrice, except for some of the caterers. But Grace was vane and she handpicked those making sure she wouldn't be outshined.

'_Boring,' _he thought with ennui. He might as well go home. But he hadn't slept on his own for a long time. He feared he'd lost the necessary skill and might end up rolling out of the bed and breaking a leg if there wasn't anyone on the other side of his bed to stop him. He started scouting the room for an old acquaintance that could be easily persuaded to rise to pillow task, when he saw his hostess walk into the room in a flashy animal print.

Grace wasn't alone. She walked in drop-dead high heels with a studied carelessness. And she was tagging along a beautiful brunette, who sported a leash and a collar. The brunette was clad in a leopard pantsuit that stuck to her like a second skin. What looked a bit vulgar on Grace looked really good on the brunette. The brunette carried herself with unconscious feline gracefulness that made Miss Maximilian look like a three-legged mule. The girl in the leopard skin kept staring fixatedly at the floor, but, perhaps sensing the intensity of Alex' eyes on her, she looked up at him briefly with deep dark green eyes filled with golden sparks.

He'd always made fun of the stupid hyperboles some men, caught in the grip of hormones, use to describe the objects of their lusts. But now he finally understood that there wasn't any exaggeration involved in the phrase: drowning in someone's eyes. He would gladly take a dive in those dark green wells any given day. She was the most ravishing creature he had ever seen, and he had seen a few. Grace must be back on something or else she wouldn't have dared to show her face around that woman, so much for her trip to rehab.

Understandably, everyone wanted a better look at the pair and Alex had to fight to reach them. He had started smiling his way closer and had ended up using his elbows to persuade the crowd to open up for him. It was no use. He got to a clear in the adoring mob just in time to see the brunette being taken away by something Chinese in a flowing kimono.

By the time he made it to the door they were gone. He'd asked Geoffrey for a name, an address, anything. Geoffrey came from a long line of butlers that had watched over the follies of the Maximilian's heirs with impeccable sangfroid since King George's times, so Alex was not surprised that the man just shrugged stating that those details were Miss Gracie's business. Madame insisted on making the arrangements for her soirees by herself. So Alex took his business to Miss Gracie.

* * *

There's not such thing as a free lunch, and with Madame it was always quid pro quo. Grace's appetites were egregious so it was daytime when he could finally get to what really interested him.

"My, oh my, Alexander! That Grand Tour you took last year has done wonders for you," Grace said with a lewd smile on her pretty face.

Alex smiled back, kissing a satin-like shoulder: "Well, dear Grace, it has come at a great cost. I've lost track of you. So tell me. What you've been up to lately?"

She laughed shoving him away: "Cut the Don Juan crap, Alexander. It's me you are talking to. You don't do pro bono. Hell! The day you do something without an ulterior motive, I'll eat Geoffrey's shoes. You want something from me and I can bet this isn't it," she signaled her bed with a dramatic gesture. Faking a hurt expression that was closer to reality than what she would like to admit.

He laughed goodheartedly and begged her for forgiveness the best way he knew how, before asking her: "Actually, I do need some information. But you know that I always want you," he wasn't exactly lying, but he'd said that to mollify her. Faced with a skeptically raised eyebrow, he decided to cut to the chase: "Where did you find that luscious creature you were dragging around last night?"

"That?" She panted in disbelief.

"Of course, she's ravishing."

"You're not serious, are you?" she asked hopefully but he denied. She plunged back to bed with a horrified expression on her face: "My word, Alexander. I think that's to rich even for you!"

She sounded truly shocked and Alex misread why: "Well, Grace dear, I'm self confident. I think I can handle your girl."

Grace blinked, disgust painted in her face, and hissed: "She's not mine. She was a rental."

He paled: '_No way! She's lying. That woman wasn't a hooker. She had too much class for that.'_ Alex thought he would have picked on it in a second. Again he misinterpreted the meaning of her words: "Believe me, darling. If you don't want to share, I can totally understand it. But, if you are going to lie to me, come up with something better. You're slipping, girl. Could it be that you're jealous, Grace?"

Grinding her teeth she got up, picked up pen and paper, scribbled on it with a shaky hand and gave him the address: "Go and see for yourself. You can keep her… I've done some things in my life, but I'm certainly not into that. Dear God! I do have my limits. Some things are just not done…" she stifled a chill, grabbing a peignoir from a chair and wrapping it tightly about her. She muttered something under her breath he couldn't quite make out and said out-loud: "Congratulations, Alexander. Now you have me sounding like my mother. Look, I don't care. Do what you want. And while you are at it, add mine to the list of places where you're not longer welcomed."

Whatever she was on, it certainly didn't improve her mood. Alex made a mental note of sending her a big bouquet of yulan magnolias –her favorite flower- and his pharmacist's card. Then he drove to Chinatown.

* * *

An intriguing creature in a black and white kimono with a chrysanthemums print opened the door. One of his/her eyes was golden and the other one was violet. The Chinese was yummy, probably the same one he'd seen last night. But the place looked crappy, hardly a place that could count Grace Maximilian in its clientele. A small sign said Pet Shop. Alex laughed between teeth; the owner sure had a dark sense of humor.

D let Alex in, leaned briefly and said: "Welcome. Come in, please. You've arrived just in time for tea."

Inside, things improved only slightly. Nevertheless, the tea was delicious, fruity and smoky; though it was tart at first, it left a sweet taste in the mouth. He knew it was oolong, a tea which fermentation process is somewhere in the middle of green and black. And he suspected it was Dān Cōng, an oolong that mimics the flavor of some fruits and flowers. But he couldn't pinpoint exactly which variety it was. And he fancied himself something of a connoisseur. After holding the liquid in his mouth for a while, he finally swallowed admitting his defeat: "Delightful. What tea is it? I know it's oolong but of what variety, I can't tell."

"Oh, it's made by request. You might say it's a family secret, so I can't tell either."

The man giggled and the sound of it was almost as good as the tea. Yes, surprisingly, he claimed to be male and a Count none the less. He could have easily passed himself as female and might have been a real Count too. As Alexander knew from firsthand experience, a nobility title doesn't pay the rent, otherwise his mother, the daughter of an entrepreneuring fish-monger who'd made a fortune, wouldn't have been able to buy a Duke and marry him. This Count D guy was quite a character and, had Alex not seen the brunette first, he would have been really intrigued.

The Count kept the "Pet Shop" cover carefully. There were actually animals there, though he had seen people go to greater lengths than that to hide the true nature of their business. Plus the Count didn't talk shop during tea time. Alex upgraded the price he had thought of.

He shrugged inwardly: '_Never mind that. Some things are worth spending that extra buck.'_

"What brings you to my door, Mr. Flüstern-Lügen?"

_'Guess tea time i__s over. Time to haggle' _thought Alex with a cynical smile and said with studied casualness: "Actually, I'm interested in one of your _pets._"

"Ah!" Count D nodded: "And, do you have a particular pet in mind?"

He did, but he was no rookie when dealing with Venus merchants, so he knew better than to show his cards right away: "Oh, I wouldn't mind looking around."

Five minutes later he had a Border Collie pup drooling all over his tux and was looking at the alleged Count with a raised eyebrow.

"Is this your idea of a joke?" He grumbled handing back the dog. He didn't want it to ruin his suit with hair or worse.

Count D petted the pup, looked at him through narrowed eyes and with a small derisive smirk playing on his lips, said: "Not at all. I happen to think that dogs are wonderful pets for those who have trouble with affection and commitment. These little creatures can teach them a lesson or two."

He exhaled a couple of times and let the anger flush down. He laughed: "This charade is unnecessary, my good man. I know what your actual business is."

"Do you?"

"I should have started by telling you that Grace Maximilian recommended you to me."

"Did she?"

The Count was looking at him with his head tilted like a bird of prey. Alexander was beginning to get nervous.

"In fact, I saw you at Grace's party last night. That's the pet I'm talking about."

"Ixchel-B'alam!"

He rolled her name softly in his mouth. Hell! Even the sound of her name thrilled him: "Yes."

"She's not for sale."

"My dear Count, everything has a price and the price is of no concern here. Plus I know you gave her to Grace."

"That was a loan. But you are right, everything has a price and it has nothing to do with money. Precisely the reason why I think you can't pay it." D's smile was sweet and poisonous: "Truly valuable things, unlike passing whims, can't be obtained by a mere exchange of money."

"You'd be surprised of the lengths I'm willing to go for this whim." The moment it left his lips he knew it wasn't a lie. Truth tastes sour sweet, especially when you haven't taken it in a while. '_What has gotten into me?' _he thought frowning and then rapidly composing a blank face.

D was sizing him up and was about to show him the door when he heard the call: _((The Yellow Bacab has spoken. Bring him forth.))_

_((Your highness__, you can't possibly mean…This man is unworthy of…))_

The haughty response came before he could finish: _((Red Kami, this man's worth is not for you or me to decide. Dare you question the word of the Gods?))_

* * *

The Pet Shop was huge, larger than it looked from the outside. They walked long corridors that seemed to plunge in the darkness, yet, as they moved on, a soft glow came from the walls.

He could smell incense, something heady and miasmatic that surprisingly was still pleasant, but just marginally so, too much of it and you'd get sick.

Had that man put something in the tea? They were in a jungle. Through his dulled out senses he perceived brushes of noisy birds flying against the dark green foliage coloring their way as they moved. Alexander and the Count went down a mud path; branches hit Alex' face and a snake or a liana fell on his shoulder, startling him.

He couldn't know how long they had walked. After a while they reached a clear. Alex shook his head from side to side: '_No fucking way!'_

He was looking at a pyramid, a frigging pyramid, and not the gray ruin you are used to. No, it was covered in colors, colors as bright as the birds' plumages or the insects' carapaces, jewels and gold hanged from the stone idols' ears and necks.

He was definitely tripping, he had to be. If that Chinaman thought Alexander was defenseless on account of being doped he was sadly mistaken. He had rip men apart with the stiletto he kept in his booth while blind drunk. That's an ability you must have when you are used to seek your cravings in certain places.

He was about to take the blade out when he saw her. If seeing her sober had unbalanced him, in his present state, he couldn't help falling to his knees, literally.

She appeared framed in the smoke that came from two huge stone braziers. Alex knew that smell: copal, the resin ancient Mexicans burnt to honor their gods. She was wearing a delicate black tunic, a closer look and you could make out it was covered by darker velvety specs. Alexander thought bitterly that it was a pity she had chosen to overdo it; she was one of the few females that could have spared the theatricals, she didn't need them. She was breathtaking. She had a single string of obsidian and gold dangling between her perfect breasts – she wasn't wearing a bra. The tunic graced her round hips as she walked with... He fought to find a way that could describe the way this girl moved. Then he settled with stealth. Yes, something that conjured both danger and allure. She was walking with bared feet over dead leaves and she didn't make a sound.

Alex trembled when she looked at him with her jade eyes. She saw that and smiled derisively with her dark rose lips. Alex knew the steps of the dance and wasn't ready to be put down, not even by the goddess he was facing now. He straightened and looked back with his chin held high.

A flash of surprise crossed her eyes, but she recovered quickly. She laughed; a deep throaty sound that tugged at Alex's loins: "Such pride for a hard walker." She said in an accent that was impossible to place.

He laughed too: "I can be soft when I want to, princess." He smiled at her suggestively.

The girl batted her eyelids. She seemed confuse, though she had quite the backbone for a whore. She rose to her full height: "You don't know who you are talking to."

"Yes, we haven't been formally introduced. Your boy here is a lousy host."

Alex could feel D's nails digging into his arm, almost drawing blood as he said in a calmed voice: "How rude of me. Ixchel B'alam, watchful eye in the navel of the world, soft treader of the truth's moon tide, this man is Alexander Flüstern-Lügen. He comes to you with a request."

"I know, Red Kami. Ever since I can remember, all of his kind have come to me with a request. This one's has an easy answer: No."

Alexander felt the anger rising, there was another feeling too but he didn't stop to analyze that. He wasn't used to be refused what he really wanted. And he wasn't ready to take rejection from a bitch that had sold herself to Grace Maximilian. He was proactive. It wouldn't be the first time he had applied the principle of: what won't be willfully given, can be forcibly taken.

He was reaching for her when the Chinaman stepped in. The guy was fast and stronger than he looked, plus he had razor sharp nails. Alex had done his share of street fighting still he could barely keep up. He was trying to create a space between them to be able to pull out his blade when the girl spoke. She could shout alright.

The girl roared: "Stop! Blood won't be spilled on this sacred ground!" Thunder pounded in the skies.

Alex got distracted for a second and found himself kissing the grass. The Count was on top of him, a knee pressed hard against his back, strong hands holding his arms in a lock. Alexander stopped fretting around; he knew when he had lost.

"Okay, princess. You win. Can I ask you a question before I leave?"

That was the only request Ixchel B'alam couldn't refuse, D knew it too so he helped Alex get on his feet and waited.

Ixchel huffed: "Speak, hard walker. But beware, because I can only answer you with the truth. If you don't want to hear it, hold your tongue and leave."

"Why did you look at me in the party if you weren't interested?"

"What makes you think I was looking at you?"

"So avoiding the issue is not considered lying; eh princess? But you and I know that you had your eyes cast down and then you looked at me, just me. What was that about?"

Ixchel couldn't found a way out of it: "I've seen you before, in a dream."

"Was it a pleasant dream, princess?" he teased.

She sighed and said with a trembling voice: "No, it was a horrible black nightmare."

Alex felt the sudden urge of going to her and comfort her. But he thought that the Chinaman might misinterpret his intentions, so he stood where he was and pointed out: "You didn't seem scared."

She straightened her back "Ixchel B'alam knows no fear."

He smiled brightly: "Then why chicken out now, princess? I'm inoffensive, really."

Ixchel laughed bitterly: "Because, you silver tongued hard walker, you bring me dead. And I'm not ready to go west yet."

* * *

The Count threw him out. It wasn't the first time he lay on the sidewalk, but it was the first time he couldn't find the strength to stand up. No when he thought of the look in the girl's eyes while they left her, there was longing there, no fucking fear whatsoever. He felt bile rising to his mouth. Spite was good, that might get him going. Yes, after breathing some clean air, all was clear now. It had all being so theatrical; all probably a cheap ruse to see if he coughed up more cash. The broad was a whore, underneath the nice clothes and regal bearing. Hell! Her folks probably had come to the country floating in a banana peel. And he, blinded by a pretty face, had fallen for it. The best he could do was to forget about the whole sordid business.

But he was still chewing the bitter swab while he hogtied a poor teenaged couple he had picked up in a disco. The fools didn't saw his mean smile as he pulled the lighter from his pocket and light a cigar. The fear only reached their eyes when they saw him lighting a second one and then a third.

* * *

Ixchel B'alam, the voice of the four corners of the world, was pacing up and down. She worried with a hint of sarcasm if the madness that usually comes to visit seers had finally taken hold of her. Every damn sound startled her. A small tapir that ran by had scared her out of her skin. She had pulled out her claws on the soft jungle's floor and now they were covered in filth. She let out the air through her velvety snout, making her whiskers tremble and started licking her paws clean.

Licking wasn't a good idea, it made her restless. She itched as if she had rolled over poison ivy. She began scratching and then she stopped herself. If she lost it, she would shred herself to tatters. Frustration flashed in her green eyes. She felt rebellious of the fate she had been allotted with. For uncountable years she had served the Gods, faithfully, readily. What had she done to deserve this?

Alexander, she had meant to pronounce it like a curse but the hard walker's name, with its harsh consonants and strong vowels, sent shivers down her spine right up to the tip of her long tail. "GREOW," she swung her head from side to side and buried a fang in her black lips until she draw blood.

Feeling despondent she jumped on a leaning tree and started scouting the horizon looking for prey. The hunt was one of the few pleasures allowed to the temple's priestess. And she desperately needed some distraction, something to wipe the hard walker's face from her mind. Still, she retained enough of a sense of justice to be fair with the other jungle dwellers. She growled to the moonlet sky. That night she was on the prowl and the wise wouldn't cross her path.

D was taking tea with detective Orcot when he heard Ixchel and stopped with his cup midair.

"What the fuck was that?"

D tried hard to look innocent and said: "What would _that _be, my dear Detective?"

The growl sounded again.

"That's what I meant; it sounds like the Animal Planet on steroids. What are you keeping in the back store D?"

D caressed distractedly Q-chan's head and said: "Oh that. Well, I've been having a bit of a trouble with the heater lately. It makes the oddest gargling sound."

"And you still keep it on? With this awful heat only an insane person would use it in the first place," Leo sounded quite skeptical.

"Some of my tenants require a certain temperature to be healthy. And I've already called the technician, but who knows? It might resolve on its own."

Leo always felt disconcerted about the way D talked of his animals. Only a wacko would go around calling them tenants. But he knew better than to get caught in a discussion about it and he also knew a gargling heater wouldn't get him a warrant to crack open the store and uncover whatever illegal business was going on. Nevertheless, he felt a sick satisfaction when he pointed out: "Doubt it. Does it use gas? 'Cause if it does, you might want to fix it asp, before it blows up."

"I hope you're wrong, detective. I truly hope that's not the case."

* * *

Alexander lay on his bed looking vacantly at the ceiling. He couldn't sleep and had told himself it was the heat. They were in the middle of one of the worst heat waves in years. He wanted to convince himself that was also the reason why he had kicked out the girl he had brought home that evening. He was lying, he had picked her up for her wild honey complexion and dark curls but the moment he had seen her dull brown eyes looking sheepishly at him, he had lost interest. He still went through the motions, thinking: why pass on what is so willingly offered? But he made it as quick as it was polite to and then said he had an early meeting in the morning.

For a week and a half, since the Pet Shop incident, he'd been having trouble sleeping. These liquid green pits kept popping in front of him whenever he closed his eyes. He was losing it. It had gotten so bad that, after following a girl he had thought was Ixchel, he had to do a scale in the public bathroom and deal with himself. He hadn't done that since he was a teenager. While washing his hands he looked up to his reflection on the mirror and told himself that he was being incredibly stupid. He could have sworn that he heard Ixchel's despiteful laughter, agreeing with him.

He had to do something. He was too restless to just lie down. So he went out for a walk, good thing his car keys were in the pocket of the jacket he had taken with him out of habit; because he hadn't walked two steps before he realized he was going to Chinatown. He would have walked the ten miles that separated him from his destiny anyway, but taking the car made it easier.

He was parked in an alley 'round the shop's main entrance. He was deciding the best approach to break in, when he saw her sneaking out the back door. She wore tight white pants and a taut white t-shirt. Alex could barely breathe; she looked painfully beautiful and the doubtful expression on her face made her look very young.

She stood there looking at the car as if she had been waiting for him and, now that he was finally there, she didn't quite know what to do. Some things you don't question, Alex opened the passenger's door and she got in. They didn't speak a word between them on the way back to his apartment.

* * *

She was nervous, excited or both. Her nipples showing through the t-shirt pointed towards the second; but her anguished breathing and the trembling hands with which she had opened the car door when they had entered the garage, pointed towards the first. For reasons that Alex didn't want to analyze, he wanted to give her a chance to back away and go home.

"Second guessing your choice, princess? 'Cause this would be a good time to turn back."

"I'm here and I'm not one to turn back." Ixchel neglected to mention to the hard walker that she couldn't turn back. The minute she had left the shop she had sealed her fate.

He knew she wasn't telling him all, but he wasn't about to probe deeper and risk her leaving. Nevertheless, he tried to be gentle when he started kissing her. But she made it clear that she didn't wanted gentle. She kissed back hard and gave his lips eager small bites, all the time she kept her eyes opened.

Shit! Those eyes of her were driving him nuts. He couldn't wait. He made her kneel on the carpet and began taking off her clothes. She couldn't wait either. She was as impatient as he and she favored a different approach, she tore his clothes off his back with a strength he wouldn't have believed possible, looking at her lithe frame.

He got up to take off his pants and then finish undressing her. Again she beat him to it. It was as if she were reading his mind. She was already naked when he got rid of his pants. She presented her back to him, looking back with an inviting smile on her face. He pondered the offer for a second and then he turned her to face him. He wanted to look into the green eyes that had hunted him for the past weeks.

She seemed a little bit confused but she didn't protest, though that could have been because he was kissing her hungrily, first on her lips and then going down her neck. She began purring like a kitten.

Ixchel B'alam was on the verge of going wild. This was even better than what she had dreamt about. But she knew what was coming next and she refused to play the Gods' fool. She had seen empires rise and fall. She could ride this wave too.

But before long she was growling in frustration: "GRRRRR." Riding that wave was easier said than done. And the hard walker wasn't helping. He was taking them both softly to the west. She conjured up the image of the snow covered volcanoes she had seen once when she'd traveled to a northern city to tell a king's fate. Wishing that would help her keep her calm.

_'Snow, white, cold, soothing snow. That's it, inhale, exhale, be like the dormant volcanoes that only give out vapor and cinder once in a while.'_ She had almost convinced herself that was possible when the hard walker brought her back crashing into reality.

_'Good Lord!'_ thought Alex. She was a virgin. That stopped Alexander in his tracks. He was backing out when he felt her nails dug deeply on his back. She raised her hips and pulled him back. He could feel blood running from the wounds her nails had left. Hell! Forget the euphemism that girl had claws. If she didn't mind rough, why should he?

Snow wasn't working; in fact the snow was melting and then boiling, running down in ardent rivulets. All the breathing she could manage was rasp and shallow. The seer in her shouted: _'You foolish girl, remember what happens next. Remember what the black Bacab showed you in the vision.'_ And if what she had seen wasn't enough to do the trick, then she should at least remember what awaited her in the afterlife if she continued walking down this path. The black Bacab was going to be there to meet her. He sure as hell wasn't going to be happy. And his wrath indeed was a sight to behold. If you saw his face looking angrily at you once, you couldn't forget it, no matter how hard you tried. She sighed in relief: _'Yes, that'll do the trick'._

Ironic, that's what Alex thought before leaning exhausted against Ixchel. The only gal he cared to please and, for some unfathomable reason, she had decided to fight against it. The only comfort he had left was that she didn't look victorious. He caressed her face and hugged her tightly, thinking that maybe tomorrow or the day after that he'd have better luck. In any case, if he could help it, she was staying with him.

Ixchel thought that was Pyrrhic victory if she'd ever seen one. Nevertheless, they had come too close. She would have felt despondent if it weren't for the man breathing softly by her side. He clung to her as a cub would and she felt a tenderness towards him that she wouldn't have thought possible. She knew that very instant that she had been right to quit the Pet Shop, this was worth dying for. Her death of course, she was leaving before anything could happen to him. She looked at him and thought before snuggling closer to him and falling asleep: _'Well, I'll leave first thing in the morning.'_ She had traded immortality for this and she at least deserved the memory of a happy night.

* * *

"Leon, there's someone waiting for you in the chief's office."

It was D and he looked distressed. That made Leon's stomach churn. This was the same man that had kept his cool during a man eating rabbit invasion and last Christmas he had taken him on a wild goose chase for a Dragon egg during a black-out always keeping the Mona Lisa smile on his face.

"Oh, Detective, this is terrible! One of my pets has gone missing. I fear she might have been stolen. She's one of my shop's most remarkable tenants."

"What is she? On second thought, don't tell me. I don't wanna know. Just tell me if we need to call the Army."

"No, Detective, that's not it. She is especial, but relatively harmless. And I think I do know the name of her abductor."

Leon looked at D frowning: "And how would you know that?"

"Because he tried to buy her but I refused. He didn't seem like a man who would take no for an answer."

* * *

In the name of Tepeu and Gucumatz, the hard walker was headstrong. He had woken up when she was trying to sneak out of the apartment and he wasn't letting her leave. Ixchel frowned: "You don't understand. I want to stay, but I can't. I really can't."

"Is this for what happened last night? Come on, princess! I did tried my best. You should at least give me a second chance to redeem myself."

"No, that's not it. Last night was wonderful. I would gladly trade it for a thousand years," which was exactly what she had done: "But if I stay here, we'll both die."

She might have deluded herself into thinking that she would be able to control herself. And, if she hadn't caught him watching her sleep with his eyes speaking promises that his lips dare not speak, she might have believed it. But she couldn't fight that kind of look. She was bound to cave in if she stayed, and she wouldn't or she would end up harming him. The image of her first vision of him slapped her full in the face and that was enough to strengthen her resolve.

He couldn't let her go, no matter what. The fact that she didn't seem to get that, made him want to hurt her: "So you'd rather go back to being a whore."

She laughed goodheartedly: "So you, the expert, didn't notice you were in uncharted territory?"

He had and it only made him feel more territorial about her. The thought of letting her go back to that dreadful shop or to be dragged by the likes of Grace made his skin crawl.

He embraced her tightly, burying his convulse face in her chest. He hadn't cried in public since he was eight in a train station, when he had begged his dad to take him with him. His pleads hadn't worked, his father had left him and his mother without ever looking back. His grandpa had finished the job, instilling him with a fear of ridicule that was almost a phobia. But, faced with the possibility of losing her, nothing else mattered. With teary eyes he pleaded: "Please, don't leave. I need you to stay."

_'No, don't __look at me like that or I may end up doing something stupid,'_ Ixchel breathed in: "It's not safe. If it were just me, I would take the chance. But I won't put you at risk. I've done all of it that I mean to do."

"Is this because of the Count?"

"The Red Kami?" she laughed: "No, of course no. He might be understanding, but there are others who won't."

"Then we'll leave, both of us. I'll make a few calls and we'll have the tickets waiting for us at the airport. Take your pick, princess. We can go anywhere you want to."

She wanted to scream but she tried to keep her voice calmed: "There's no place in the world to hide from this."

"Then we'll stay and fight whatever may come our way. I might not look it, but I'm resourceful and can be pretty dangerous myself if I mean too. Your enemy is my enemy, princess."

She looked at him and knew two things without having to probe his mind. He wasn't joking and she was doomed. Some things you can't run from. She wasn't even sure she would've wanted to run if she could have. She was crying when he started kissing her eyelids.

"Silly hard walker," she muttered with a lump in her throat.

But he didn't care, as long as she was staying, he was blessed. Sure, he didn't deserve it, but he was blessed. He wanted to laugh and he did. It was the first time in years he'd laughed for real.

'_This is it. This is what I've been looking for without ever knowing that I was looking for it; and now it's here.' _

Even if he knew she wasn't lying -someone really dangerous was coming to try to take her away- he felt confident that he was going to beat whoever it was. With her by his side, he felt invincible. Getting all you want without having to work for it can do that to you. He just couldn't imagine that he might lose the only thing he couldn't live without.

* * *

"He has several addresses. Any idea where he might have taken her?" asked Leo scanning the computer screen.

D answered without stopping to think about it: "The one closest to the shop. I bet he was in a hurry."

Orcot narrowed his eyes and asked suspiciously: "In a hurry for what?"

God! Was the Count blushing? Leon threw D a sideways glance.

D didn't want to lose time. He said as he walked beside Leo to the car: "We need to hurry, before it's too late."

Leo reluctantly got into the car. D's attitude was getting on his nerves. He asked harshly: "What exactly are we talking about here, D?"

Nervously biting his lower lip, D breathed out: "The wrath of the Gods."

If anyone else had said that, Leon would have laughed. But D looked dead serious and something inside of Detective Orcot's brain shouted: Step on it!

* * *

_'To Hell with the Gods,'_ Ixchel thought. She'll deal with them later. Caressing his cheek she thought_: 'This is the only truth that matters.'_ Resting his face on her hand Alex lost himself in her eyes and understood that she was The Answer, never mind the question. Hell, he hadn't even known there was a question. Together they felt whole.

But they were both forgetting that you can't escape from the watchful eye. You may think you have, but it's just a matter of time until you're finally spotted and dealt with. And those bastards have an endless supply of time. That doesn't make them less impatient to take revenge, though.

The spell that masked her identity had been broken and Ixchel B'alam was going mad. She had bitten her lover's neck. She had broken it and, in her anguish to help him, she had further hurt his body. Now she was watching life flow away from his open wounds. Still, he was looking at her with adoring eyes. She began raking her face with her nails, growling in despair.

He tried to make her stop, but he was so weak that all he could do was to mutter: "I knew you couldn't be from this world."

She inhaled deeply, fighting to regain control; then she kissed him silent: "I'm not. And this isn't over, not yet."

She pulled a maguey leaf out of nowhere. The plant was hard and ended in a thorn that looked quite sharp. She punctured her hands and let the blood flow mixed with her tears on each corner of the room. Then she stood in the middle of the room, facing the raising sun and she began chanting in a tongue Alex couldn't understand. She looked terrible and majestic. He thought it was weird he had to be dying to grasp that he loved her.

Ixchel B'alam raised her hands towards the skies. She wasn't petitioning, she was demanding. She felt entitled to. Nevertheless, when the floor behind her back began trembling and cracked open giving out sulfurous vapors, she had to repress the need to make a run for it.

She shouldn't have been so afraid. The black Bacab hadn't bother coming in person. He had sent the Bat god. Ixchel forced herself to look at his ugly face with an expressionless demeanor.

The Bat god went for the quick: "Even after you have defiled yourself, cat, after you've laughed in our faces, you still dare call out our name?"

"That's what your boss says? I rather speak to him directly. I'm not used to deal with second raters."

The bat hissed and Ixchel remembered this beast had been the one who had beheaded the morning star. But she was no second rater either, so she held her ground.

After an awkward silence the Bat god spat out: "What do you want, cat?"

Ixchel pretended she hadn't heard the despise dripping from his words and stated: "Only what it's rightfully mine after a couple of hundredth years of service."

The bat looked at Alexander and sniggered: "So this is the price of the moon cat?"

Then the foul thing looked at Ixchel's naked body and she couldn't help taking a backwards step. The bat raised an eyebrow, laughed harshly and coughed up a mass of something gray and red at her feet.

"We owe you nothing."

"I'm not begging, bat. I offer you a trade, my life for his."

"No, that I won't have, princess."

Stubborn hard walker, Ixchel hushed him: "Quiet, my love. This doesn't concern you."

"It's my life so it does. And I sure as hell won't trade it in for yours."

The bat screeched: "You can both keep them. There's nothing to gain here so there's no deal."

He was leaving. Ixchel cut his retreat and growled with the back of her throat: "Do you mean to say the life of the mouth of the God's is worthless, bat?"

The Bat god wouldn't go that far, he remembered that he had only prevailed over the morning star briefly through deceit; an open confrontation was a whole different matter.

"No, but the value has diminished through your folly, cat. There's still one thing I can offer you."

It was a crappy offer, but they didn't have an option.

Alex protested: "No, I won't let you do this, princess."

Ixchel huffed impatiently: "If it were the other way around, would you stay behind?"

Alex didn't answer out-loud, he didn't have to. They both nodded and held each other while the Bat god lived up to his name.

After the deal was done, they left their useless shells behind. Alexander passed an arm around Ixchel's waist and they followed the earth on its eastward spin, leaving this world and its troubles behind.

* * *

Leon Orcot had seen some things throughout his association with Count D, but this was weird even by D's standards.

"Shit! What is this?"

The guy was naked. He was embracing a big spotted cat. He had deep wounds all over him. The heads of both the cat and the guy where nowhere to be found; they'd both been drained out of blood. Only a small part of it was on the carpet. The rest had disappeared.

"We are too late," said D crestfallen.

Leon leaned against the wall, feeling dizzy. This was too much: "What was this guy thinking?"

"To find out that, Detective, we would need to ask the Gods. It's a pity there's no one left who can speak with them."

_**Ok, seems harsh, but still is sort of a happy ending. At least all the happy ending that lies' whisperer deserves. I'm told that's the meaning of the surname**__** Flüstern-Lügen, in case you want to know.  
Oh, and the gal is a jaguar. Let me warn you that I'm mixing myths here, so, purist beware. B'alam is the Mayan word for jaguar. The Maya also had Bacabs, jaguar gods of the four cardinal points and Ixchel the moon goddess was their mother. I was going to use Iqi-B'alam, moon jaguar, but it didn't sound nice in English.  
The Bacabs were oracles and were associated with a color (north-white, south-yellow, east-red and west-black). West was bad news. Heck, at least it's all Mayan. If you want to learn more, especially about how the morning star ultimately kicked that bat god's ass, read the Popol Vuh. There are some very nice free translations available on the web.  
Once upon a time wearing a jaguar's pelt (which always has spots but can be yellow, white or black) was a sign of courage in battle –an honor only awarded to worthy warriors. And their glyph was attached to the name of kings. Jaguars were respected and worshiped. Today the legend is dying: they are in danger of becoming extinct. Gee, now I feel bad for killing one, if only in make belief. It's your fault Red. You are west bound, man. You really are.**_

_**Mercurial Weather.**__**  
Curses or Comments? I love reviews and I appreciate constructive critic.**_


	4. Delerict 1

_If you can't tak__e the heat, leave the kitchen. Aspiring chef Candace couldn't, so she had decided to quit and slit her wrists. While her big brother Peter fought to keep her in the game, her little sister Millie whispered a wish to D's snake. And, boy, did she get it._

**AN: ****Thanks for reviews, I'm glad someone out there is enjoying my stories. Now, is the warning really necessary? This is rated T, as should be the case with any story about getting what you wish for mixed with a fair proportion of what you deserve. That combo is usually enough to damn anyone, and it's actually my favorite curse. If you have reptile issues don't bother reading this one. I'm finally doing a PSOH with my favorite animal –snakes- and I'm dedicating it to a friend who dropped out because of a rat problem. I picked my master degree for purely practical considerations- I wanted a dainty little paper that would help me get a promotion to pay my mortgage and keep up with my nasty eating-three-times-a-day habit. But for her the decision came down to fulfilling a childhood dream. Still, she allowed herself to be run away from her bliss by this… asshole. And then she came to me talking nonsense about wanting to quit it all… and I mean ALL. In the end I was able to talk her out of it while keeping my poker face on. But all the while I wanted to cry out: AGGGH! So not only am I claiming full responsibility for this little story; I'm taking pleasure in it.**

Pet Shop of Horrors

Derelict: Part I

"_A__ny idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out." Antón Chéjov_

Candace was hurt. Peter had found her lying on the floor and had forbidden Millicent from entering the room. Then he had left with their sister wrapped in a blanket and he'd told Millie to go to Miss Robertson's and wait for him there.

Millie was usually a very well-behaved little girl. She thought her older siblings had enough trouble without her being bad. She hadn't meant to disobey Peter, but she couldn't take her eyes away from the bathroom's floor. She hadn't done it in a while but she had started sucking her thumb to stop the tears. She had sat with her back leaning against the tiled wall, watching the water running from the faucet they had forgot to close erase the big red stain while she embraced Mr. Buttons, the bunny her Mom had sewn for her before she and Dad had gone to Heaven.

Sucking her thumb had only helped for a while. As soon as she thought about Mom and Dad being in Heaven tears started streaming down her cheeks. She sobbed; she didn't want Candace to go to Heaven. Peter had told her Heaven was pretty and Mom and Dad were happy. Millicent loved Candace and she wanted her to be happy, but she wanted her to be happy here, with her and Peter.

Millie cleared her nose on her sleeve and remembered she was supposed to go to Miss Robertson's. She stood up and walked the few steps that separated her home from her neighbor's. She had already ringed the bell when she noticed she had left the faucet running. She ran back and closed it, when she came back Miss Robertson, who knew Millie wasn't the sort of girl who goes ringing bells to bother her neighbors, was outside waiting for her.

"What's the matter, lightbug?"

Millicent began telling her and couldn't help the tears that started flowing once more. Without another word Miss Robertson, who insisted on being called Claire, picked her up and let her into her apartment.

Claire was a biologist. She had told Millie that meant she studied life. Millie thought that was a lot to study, she had trouble enough learning what 3 times 4 was. But she liked Claire's home because it had lots of plants and animals, some were really cool. Usually Millie could spend the whole afternoon looking at them. And when Candace had classes and Peter was late from work Claire had no problem with babysitting her little neighbor. But today the marvels of Claire's apartment couldn't hold her attention. Millie couldn't even drink her cocoa or eat her cookies. That was odd, because Claire baked some really good cookies. Millie thought that perhaps it was because she felt so full with sadness that she couldn't take in anything else.

Claire looked at her little neighbor and scouted her apartment for something that she could use to distract her. A green spiral caught her eye. It was a snake, thin and long that was leisurely climbing up a branch in the terrarium. That might do the trick.

"Look Millie, see that branch there is moving!"

"That's not a branch."

"Do you know what it is?" Claire had taken the snake out and was letting it wrap around her fingers.

Millie just nodded wide-eyed. Claire held the snake over her head and waited until the little girl whispered: "It's a snake."

"Yes she is. She is a rat catcher."

"She can catch rats?" said Millie automatically taking on Claire's habit of talking about her animals as if they were people. The little girl sounded skeptical. Right after their parents had died, before the insurance company had paid the check, they had lived in some nasty places and Millie had seen rats. They were big and scary. The snake was really little, so her disbelief showed through her question.

In one of Peter's rare sharing moods he had told Claire about the rat incident, so she nodded sympathetically: "Well, not yet. She's a baby now, but someday she will. Want to touch her? Her skin is really smooth and cool."

Millie cautiously extended her arm, clutching Mr. Buttons with the other; ready to take it away if the snake made any sudden movement. She was a brave girl; she'd had to learn to be one. So she barely trembled when she felt the green reptile climbing up her wrist. It was really smooth and not all that cold. It felt nice. Letting go the air she had been holding, Millie gave Claire a small smile.

Claire's smile fell right off her face while she answered the phone. It was Peter, he sounded exhausted. That didn't bode well; usually the guy never took his mask off, least of all to show weakness. He was a hedgehog, not a surprise considering what he had gone through. But despite being emotionally distant he had managed to grow on Claire. No surprise there either. She liked them weird and had a huge Florence Nightingale complex. When she was little she was the kid that's always picking strays and bringing them home. She had a knack for getting hurt creatures to trust her. This particular hedgehog was more reluctant than most, but even he sometimes put down his needles and let her pet him.

She tried to comfort him. She couldn't. He was too angry. Angry at his sister for putting them through this after the hell they had lived the last couple of years since their parents had died in a car crash. But most of all he was angry at himself, that guy carried the world on his shoulders. He was furious at his inability to pay for better health care that could mean the difference between his sister's recovery and her…Shit! Was the guy crying? Probably not, she had never seen him doing that.

"So how is she doing?" Claire asked, mostly to see if he had hung up.

He laughed bitterly: "She lives, if that's what you're asking."

Candace had come through and had been confronted by Peter's inquiring gaze. She had started crying and told him. All her life she had wanted to become a chef. Against all odds she had earned a scholarship to fulfill her dream and now she had lost it. She had failed, and she couldn't face it.

"So that's why you quitted? You didn't cared Millie could find you?"

"Oh my God! Did she?"

"No, but she could have. I found you. Let's thank god for small mercies." He'd tried to keep the anger and hurt out of his voice but he hadn't managed. Of late anger seemed to be the whole scale of his emotional range.

Candace couldn't look him in the eye while she muttered: "Peter, I'm sorry…I."

That's when she'd confessed there was more to it. A guy, he was Candace's teacher and had become something else. That hadn't stopped him for ridiculing her in front of her classmates whenever he could. If you listened to the bastard, Candace was clumsy, plain and totally inadequate. Afterwards he told her he only did it so no one would suspect. He was married.

"What a rat!" Claire gazed nervously at the bed. Nothing, fortunately she hadn't woken up the little lightbug. Millie breathed softly. She took the phone and went out to the living room.

"She finally realized he had no intention of leaving his wife so she was leaving him. As a parting gift he gave her an F as a final note and he wrote a comment: Unable to perform satisfactorily the tasks presented to her."

"Fuck!"

Peter answered once more with the bitter laughter: "I wanted to kill him. I'm not joking. I thought about buying a gun and blowing up his face."

Claire felt a knot in the pit of her stomach: "Peter! Where are you?"

"Where else? I'm in the waiting room at the hospital. Don't worry, I won't. As much as this guy deserves it; I have bigger fish to fry right now. Besides, I can't afford the fucking gun. I'm on a tight budget here."

"God!" She could never tell if he was joking or if he meant it. But Claire hoped this was just another outburst of his dark sense of humor.

Whatever the case Peter went back to the brusque tone he used when he had to ask for help: "I'm not going anywhere tonight. I need you to keep an eye on Millie, and maybe come here tomorrow so I can go take a shower and change my clothes."

"Sure. Call me when you want me to go." And then is when Claire should have said her goodbyes and not meddled in other people's business. But it was in her nature to speak up her mind so she said: "You know, Peter, blowing up his face is a really stupid idea. But Candace should report this bastard to the school board."

"Yeah, well, now she has bigger fish to fry too," said Peter and after a brief goodbye he hung up.

Claire pushed the off button of the phone with all the frustration she couldn't let out any other way and went to fix some coffee. That night she wasn't going to get any sleep anyway.

Millie squinted half asleep. She knew what had harmed her sister. Without waking up she cowered under the covers and tried to erase the image of this giant rat that was coming to get her too.

* * *

The next morning, as soon as the sun got up, Claire and Millie began pacing the apartment like caged beast. They both jumped whenever the phone rang. They got two wrong numbers before Peter's call. Claire didn't need to go. Something had come up. Candace needed surgery. When she fainted she had hit her head against the bathtub and she had a subdural hemorrhage. The doctors explained that was a blood clog in her brain. They were going to drain it and Peter wasn't going anywhere until they did. So he told them to stay put.

Easier said than done; Claire couldn't stay still and neither could Millie. What to do? Go to the movies? Sure, as if they could concentrate on it while Candace was lying on the operation table. Then what?

"Tell me, lightbug, have you ever been to Chinatown?"

Millie had never been there before. Chinatown was bright and crowded and she felt a little bit dizzy. There was so much to see she had let go Claire's hand and now she was lost. She held on to Mr. Buttons as a castaway would to a passing timber.

Padma noticed the little girl at the verge of tears that bravely held onto her plush toy instead of crying for help, so she tugged D's sleeve and pointed her out to him.

"Are you lost, little one?" asked D leaning gracefully towards the girl in the blue jeans and pink t-shirt till his mismatched eyes were at the same level as hers.

Millie looked up hopefully and then with curiosity into D's eyes, but just for a couple of seconds because she had been taught that staring was not polite. Then she remembered another one of Peter's advices and said holding back a disappointed sigh: "I'm sorry, Miss. I'm not allowed to speak to strangers."

"Well, then we'll introduce each other. I'm Count D and I'm not a lady."

She wasn't supposed to tell him her name but she was also supposed to remain in the same place were she had lost Claire. Count D was not leaving and she didn't want to be rude just ignoring him. And, to confuse her even further, the stranger said he was a boy. Looking puzzled, Millie said: "But you are wearing a dress."

"It's not a dress, it's a kimono," said D with a small smile.

"Boys don't wear dresses," Millie pointed out stubbornly.

"So what do boys wear?" said D with more than a little amusement creeping to his voice. He could almost see the little clogs inside of her head going wildly round and round. What an interesting little cub. Leave it to Padma to spot her in the midst of a crowd.

"Pants, I guess."

"You are wearing pants. Does that make you a boy?"

"No. These are girl's pants. See? There's a flower on them." Millie giggled.

"Ah, but you see, some flowers are boys and this is a boy's kimono."

Millie was pondering that when she noticed the flying bunny and blurted out: "He's just like Mr. Buttons! Only his wings are wrong." Mr. Buttons' were golden.

D noticed the stuffed animal she was holding. Someone had loved this little girl a lot and had wanted to protect her: "Let me see. It is true. Q-chan, look at your twin. Isn't he cute?"

"Millie! Where are you?"

Millie turned around and waved: "I'm here, Claire."

Claire felt relief wash down her: "Oh Honey, I was worried sick. I lost sight of you for a second and the crowd kept pushing me away."

"That would be because of the Qingming."

"Pardon?" said Claire noticing the… man? That was standing besides Millie.

D carried on unfazed: "Qingming, the traditional Chinese spring festival. People honor their ancestors and, since most tombs are back in China or Honk Kong, they burn them offerings. Right now everybody is out shopping and as the saying goes: treading the greenery."

Claire huffed: "What little greenery is left in the city."

The man didn't answered he just looked intently at her with his odd mismatched eyes.

There was something about him that rang a bell. Claire narrowed her eyes and said: "You are Count D, aren't you? This is a freakish coincidence. I came here to purchase crickets for my lizard. She's having trouble digesting what I usually give her and a friend told me about you."

"Oh, then it is a happy coincidence, Miss…?"

"Robertson… Claire is better." Miss Robertson made her feel like an old maid. Then something caught her attention: "Holy Cow! Is that a blizzard?"

Millie looked at her as if she had gone mad. Then she said in that condescendingly polite tone smart children use to correct adults when they don't want to offend them: "There are no blizzards in spring."

"No Millie, the snake. I think it's a Corn Snake and her shading, this beautiful snow white, is called blizzard. But she is huge. This lady and the one you held last night are related, lightbug."

Five minutes later Millie was watching Padma wrapping around her arm and then dangling a section of her slim body forming swings.

'_Those two have__ hit it off really quick'_, thought Claire while watching them play with a smile on her face.

"Are you a snake's enthusiast, Miss Claire?"

"Well, I'm actually trying to become a herpetologist so I work with them. Millie here has just been introduced to the vice. I'm afraid that's my fault." Claire did work with them but she kept them at home and gave them names. That was terribly unprofessional of her so she didn't go around confessing that to strangers.

The man looked at her with his mismatched eyes. Claire felt a little bit nervous. He seemed satisfied with what he had seen and offered to escort them to his shop. Claire wasn't going to lose Millie again so she hoisted her up and supported part of her weight with her hip.

It was like seeing Moses parting the waters. People let him through and gave him small curtseys. Heck, he was definitely more than a Pet Shop manager. Or else the Pet Shop was a lot fancier than she had been let to think. Claire counted her money mentally. Could she afford the 'especial' crickets? Forget about the snake. She gave Millie a pained look. The kid was smitten with the blizzard. She was whispering softly to her. And Claire had to bite her tongue not to tell her snakes can't actually hear you, they feel vibrations but no sound the way we understand it.

The serpent's head was suddenly pointed towards her. Claire was so startled that she almost let Millie fall. The Count took Millicent from her arms and held her as if she weighted nothing. Boy, the man was stronger than he looked. Claire was a big girl and carrying Millie hadn't been easy.

Claire had been a bit of a tomboy when she was a child. She still could scare people when she meant to, even sometimes when she didn't. Most men were actually smaller than her and felt intimidated by that. Except Peter, he was half a head shorter and still managed to make her feel delicate and feminine.

'_Christ!'_ She thought that he had really scared her last night when he had told her about the gun. _'Please, let him be fine,' _she prayed_._

She felt the blizzard forming loops around her arm. Apparently the snake had stayed behind when the Count took Millie. It was as if she was trying to sooth her. _'Yeah right. You should know better than to believe that anthropocentric crap. And you should know better than to get attached to things you can't get in the end. That's really stupid, girl. And I'm not talking solely about the snake. You know how that story goes. You get close to someone and then when they go you end up with your butt in the air. Been there, done that. Don't really care to repeat the experience.'_ She hadn't even noticed she had begun caressing Padma.

* * *

They were having tea and Millie was playing with an assortment of cubs and puppies. Claire wasn't sure what had happened but she had ended up telling this complete stranger all that had happened to her neighbors in the past two days.

"I really don't know how much she saw or understood for that matter."

"Children usually understand things better than adults do, is only as they grow that their sight gets clouded" said Count D with a Mona Lisa smile that made Claire even more nervous.

"Well, ain't that great? Whoever designed this world is a sadist. Still, I'm not sure if she can handle it."

"And what is it to you, Miss Claire? What's this child to you?"

"Me, well, let's say I'm a friend of the family." That sounded pathetic even to her. What was she to her neighbors? She knew what the oldest one thought: convenient and temporary. Millie found her intriguing in an 'odd snake lady' sort of way. And Candace had always been sort of a mystery, so quiet and shy that one was. "I'm their neighbor, but I care for them... All of them."

Talk about circumstantial. If they had been given an option, would they still have picked her up for sharing their life? Because she would have, ever since that day, two years earlier, when she had seen the sullen and hurt trio moving next door and start fighting to rebuilt their life she had opened more than her door to them. And out of all the people in the world she wouldn't have hesitated to choose them. Claire sighed, turned around to stop facing those inquisitive mismatched eyes and dedicated herself to the safer task of watching Millie and Padma play.

Padma was telling Millie that snakes are ancient and proud people. At first the little girl had been a bit scared.

"You can talk?" she had asked with a somewhat shaky voice.

"Yesss, daughter of man. We've been talking long before your kind hasss." Padma had said. Then she had told Millie how snakes share an ancient wisdom no human can even begin to imagine.

But as Padma told her the tale of her kindred, correcting some misunderstandings that had gone down through the ages, she relaxed. So much that she ended up telling her about Mom, Dad, Candace and Peter.

"Ssso what do you want, cub? Do you want the rat dead?" Padma put her tongue out to feel her better.

Millie denied: "No, but take him somewhere far away. Like my cousin's mouse. She had babies and one of them was drowning in the water so George had to save him. The mommy got angry and she hurt the babies. Uncle Mark took her to the forest. Take him someplace where he won't be able to harm anyone else."

"That's it really?" Padma probed the girl and found out she didn't know Uncle Mark had drowned _the mommy_ in a bucket after she killed her own cubs. Still, Padma had to ask, it was part of her job: "Are you sure that's all you want me to do?"

Millie thought hard about it, she disliked rats so much. But she didn't want anyone to get hurt, not even a rat: "Yes…and I want Candace and Peter to be happy again…and Claire too."

Padma nodded and called out for her sisters. Millie couldn't understand what they were saying, they were talking weird. Millie wasn't even sure talking was the right word; they were hissing and wriggling all over the lawn.

"What do you say ladiesss? Should we give the cub what she wantsss?"

Takshata rolled her red rings and said: "Seems fair. I'll take the boy."

Shankapala shook her golden scales and laughed: "You always pick the boys…You're sssuch a ssslut." Takshata hissed at her but Shankapala ignored her: "I'll take the girl in the hospital."

Ananta slid her long dark blue body raising her big head: "No, I'll take her."

Padma used her older sister privilege: "I had thought the rat should be for you. You've always liked the hunt. The girl is too weak. She needs a kinder touch than yours."

Ananta laughed: "She doesn't need gentle, or I wouldn't be interested. She has had _gentle_ and look what that brought her."

Padma looked at her sister. The dark blue seldom spoke but when she did she was usually right. Padma hated that. Nevertheless, she decided it was better to be safe than sorry: "Go to her then, but Shankapala is keeping an eye on you. You'll both have the girl and the rat."

"Haaaahhh! I don't need a babysssitter," protested Ananta.

Shankapala sniggered: "I love you too, sisss."

Padma turned to the youngest, Jaya. As usual the green was distracted. She was brushing her hair not paying attention. Padma cleared her throat and said: "That leaves you the other girl."

"Do I have to?" asked Jaya without really looking at their direction, today her hair was just the way she liked it.

"Yes you do, you lazy green. Plus it's easier that way."

"Easier?"

Padma had to curb her impatience at her younger sibling. A few more spins on the karma wheel and she might become tolerable. _'Breathe, whitey,'_ she said to herself, _'and then have a long hard look at your own lacks before you judge others.'_ So much for the higher road, Jaya was entranced by her own reflection in the carps' pond and Padma couldn't help giving the green a poisonous look while she pointed out: "Yes, easssier. You go to the snake she keepss locked and tell her to go hike for a couple of days."

Jaya looked at her vacantly.

Padma counted mentally to ten 1…2…3… waiting for the dumb green to catch up. Then she realized that wasn't going to happen anytime soon, so she finally said: "She's green too, Jaya. You can pass yourself for the snake she keeps at home."

Shankapala started laughing but Padma stopped her with a warning glance. Takshata covered her laughter with a fake cough that fooled no one.

Jaya looked resentfully at the three of them, and then she turned to Ananta the second oldest for support. The look on the dark blue told her she was barking up the wrong tree: "And what are _you _doing, ssisss?" she asked looking resentfully towards the white one.

Padma ignored her tone as best as she could. Still, she raised her upper body and swung a little to let her know she was nearing the end of the rope: "Obviously I'll take the little girl. Any objections?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.

They all remained silent.

"Then it's settled. Come on, ladies! Move your rings, get that mojo going. The Cold Food Festival has two days left."

It's a cliché, but vengeance is a dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold and, sure enough, snakes are people of impeccable taste.

* * *

Candace was floating in a river, a warm pulsing river. It was so easy letting herself be carried away by the current, so easy not to fight it.

"Why fight when it's useless? Jussst like you."

Candace got up and opened her eyes. The river was waist height and she could stand up. She almost fell down when she saw who was talking to her. A python, big and black with its yellow eyes locked in hers.

"This can't be happening. I must be dreaming."

The python chuckled: "Not your usual dreams for sure. Yours are usually these silly sugary-coated fairy tales in which everything turns out fine. Well, you aren't that smart so it figures you would believe in happily ever after with all that has happened to you."

Candace wanted to cry: "Who are you? Why are you trying to hurt me? I haven't done anything to you."

The python laughed: "That's it, Candy. You haven't done much in this life, not really. You aren't much of a doer, you are a doee. In this world you are either hunter or prey. And you have lunch written all over you."

"Hey, back off creep! You don't know me. You don't know anything about me. I want to wake up now. I want to go home. Crawl back under your rock. You ugly beast!" shouted the girl as she waddled her way to the shore.

As Candace faded from the river bank, Ananta smiled. She had been right. The girl had more guts than were apparent at first sight.

In the operation room they all let out the air they'd been holding. For a minute there the girl's heart had stopped beating. But now she was back and was mumbling something that sounded vaguely like a curse. They checked the anesthetics and adjusted the dose.

* * *

Peter was lost, walking in a forest. What was he doing there? He needed to be elsewhere, if he could just remember where. He came to the shore of a pond with a small waterfall. Then he saw Claire. She was naked, singing with her ugly voice under the water.

Peter felt inundated by tenderness, something that had started happening with increasing frequency when he thought about Claire. Out of pure habit he tried to push aside the feeling and then he realized the girl couldn't see him. She liked to sing when she thought no one was listening. It wasn't only that she didn't have a nice singing voice. She was tone deaf. She was also a musical's closet fan. She had even named her lizard Liza with a z. She usually left out the 'with a z' part, but she had told him.

He was having a rough week at work and Claire was having trouble with one of her thesis' advisors. Neither of them could sleep and they both had gone out to take a walk around the block. Afterwards they had ended up sharing an insomniac midnight meal, showered with a bit too much red wine. It hadn't been the first time they had sex, but it had been the first time he had stayed the night. He justified himself thinking that he wasn't going to get any sleep anyway and that he didn't want to wake up his sisters. Emboldened by the booze, Claire had protested that he never told her anything. He also must have drink too much, because he had asked what was it that she wanted to know. She had asked him to tell her something that he had never told anyone before. And to his utter surprise, he had. He had talked about how it had been after his parents had died. All the hurt and the impotence, feeling like that guy who was in hell pushing a rock uphill only to have it fall back inches away from the goal. She had looked at him with puppy eyes and the last thing he wanted her to feel for him was pity. So then he had said that justice demanded she told him something she'd never told another living soul before.

He had just poured his guts out to this woman and she had turned around saying that she had named her lizard after Liza Minelli. She had told him, whispering in his ear and blushing as if she were confessing her deepest darkest. He should have felt angry, but he had laid there with his best poker face, trying hard not to burst into laughter. In the end, after a small awkward pause, they both realized the absurdity of it all and they had laughed like mad children. She had offered to tell him something else, but he had refused. Just being with her, even if they didn't talk, was good. He couldn't remember when was the last time he had been able to do that, with anyone but Claire. She probably didn't know it but it was in those rare moments they shared in the death of the night when he could let go that he actually felt like himself again.

Peter smiled watching her pirouetting and howling under the cascade. Yes being with her was good in more than one way. Then he remembered. _'Wake up you bastard! Your sister might be dying and you are having this sort of dream. Man, you are a heel.'_

He shouldn't have worried. He was unlucky even in dreams. Something big with red glowing eyes was coming out of a cave behind the water curtain. Claire had her back turned to it. Peter wasn't sure how he knew, but he was certain that the thing was about to devour her.

Over the sound of the waterfall she wouldn't listen if he screamed, so he tried to run towards her. He couldn't. He was hogtied. Then he realized the ropes were writhing. They weren't ropes at all, they were snakes! He fought but he knew it was all in vain. As usual, he was going to lose.

Just before the dark red figure got Claire she turned to face him and said one of his mom's favorite poems:

"A drizzling rain falls like tears on the Mourning Day;  
The mourner's heart is going to break on his way.  
Where can a winehouse be found to drown his sad hours?  
A cowherd points to a cot 'mid apricot flowers."

He woke up with a start. His heart was pounding against his rib cage and the sight of the doctor in scrubs who was walking towards him did nothing to calm his pulse.

* * *

Claire's cell phone rang and she almost choked on her tea. Millie was distracted seeing a rainbow of snakes writhe on the floor. It was Peter saying that Candace was out of surgery. She seemed to be fine. They needed her to wake up before knowing for sure. Peter was falling sleep standing up so he needed that shower badly, and maybe some lunch.

Claire calculated if she actually had time to fix something. Hell, she'd use the credit card and buy something on the way to the Hospital. If it came to that she'll swallow her pride and ask her Dad for some money. Her little menagerie was expensive and she couldn't charge all to the lab's expense account. So by the end of the month she was usually scratching the bottom of her purse for pennies to make it to ends meet. Then she thought that if she was going to have to face her Dad why should she be cheap about it? She was going to buy her little neighbor a treat.

"Is the blizzard for sale?"

The Count and Millie looked at her. Stress is a killer. She could have sworn the snakes were looking at her too.

"This is a Pet Shop, Miss Claire. All the animals in it are for sale, if you're able to afford the price."

Boy, the guy was sort of creepy. Claire readied herself for the blow: "How much?"

"Are you buying it for yourself, Miss Claire?"

"No, every kid should have a pet. Millie's home is small and snakes are easy to look after."

"Is it for me?"

"Sure, lightbug. You can use one of my old terrariums. We'll have her feeling right at home in no time."

The Count looked from Millie to Claire and then back. He extended his hand, those were some long fingernails, and let the blizzard wind like a bracelet around his wrist. Shit, the serpent seemed to agree and Claire and Millie left with her.

Samsara is the Wheel of learning, and some lessons are more painful to learn than others. Count D was watching the Ladies dance in his backyard. He thought of his last customers and wished them luck. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Peter looked like crap. Claire wanted to hug him but she let Millie do the honors. Why risk public rejection?

She kept her distance but couldn't help asking: "Any news?"

"Not yet. We just have to wait, be patient."

God, that was surely killing him, he wasn't the patient type. Claire stifled a sigh and said: "Well then, you should probably try to get some sleep while you are home. Millie and I can wait for you here."

He rose to his full height and retorted: "I can take care of my own family."

Claire crossed her arms protectively in front of her chest and said: "Nobody doubts it, Peter." She left out the _'Besides yourself…' _that was fighting to slip from her lips. Leave it to the Mr. Hedgehog to turn concern into an insult.

Talk about your awkward silence. Claire handed him the brown bag.

"What's this?" he asked frowning.

Claire frowned back: "Lunch. And I'm not trying to imply you can't buy your own. You are probably able to catch it."

She had brought him fish sticks, mayo and ketchup, cabbage salad, a chocolate muffin, and hot cocoa in a Styrofoam glass. His face relaxed and he smiled. He hated coffee and loved fish sticks for breakfast. He sometimes even ate them right out of the fridge... It was one of his pet peeves.

Then the smile left his face and he started to apologize: "I…"

Though the guy seemed to love carrying guilt like giant chains on the shoulders, it was painful for Claire to see him beating himself up. So she interrupted him: "You're welcome. Oh, and I should probably tell you, though you might bite my head off. I bought Millie a pet."

Oh boy, the frown was back in full attack mode: "A pet?"

"She was kind enough to keep me company while I did some errands so she earned it."

"Oh Pete, she's so beautiful. Can I keep her?"

Peter looked at her little sister. She hadn't smiled like that since the car crash. He wanted to strangle Claire. They didn't have time or money to spare on a pet.

"And what is she, Millie?"

"A blizzard!" Millie yelled happily already knowing Peter was going to give in.

Peter asked: "A what?"

"It's a snake, Peter. It's perfectly safe and she can keep it in the terrarium and just let her be. Liza will share her crickets with her. I can charge it on the lab."

"No, that's fine, she can keep her."

Millie giggled: "Sweet! Her name is Padma."

Peter raised an eyebrow: "Padma? Where did you get that name from?"

"She told me."

Claire and Peter looked at each other. Then Claire shrugged: "Probably on TV."

Peter hid a smile. We all need a friend, so what if she lives only in our head.

Claire couldn't convince him to leave Millie with her. He was going just for a shower and then coming right back.

"Well then, enjoy the splash."

What was wrong with that man? He gave her a funny look and then he left dragging his youngest sister.

* * *

Claire was standing on a beach watching the surf come and go. She wasn't enjoying it, when she was five on her first trip to the ocean she had almost drowned. Her father had taken her back to the sea the next day and had made her get in. If you let your fears dictate what you can or can't do you'll end up being unable to do anything. That's what her dad had said as he had shoved her towards the waves that looked like giant jaws ready to eat her whole. With a knot in her stomach and wobbly knees Claire had faced the waves. She was daddy's brave little trooper. So she went in and came out without a protest until her father felt satisfied. Afterwards she even became a good swimmer. But she still preferred pools.

"That's also why you chose snakes."

"Who is there?"

It was Sheila, her green Corn Snake. Only she had grown a little bit after the last time she had seen her. She was about the size of a small elephant.

"You are scared of us so you keep us in our cages and tell yourself you like us."

"That's not true, Sheila. You know I like you."

Sheila stretched towards her and Claire took a backwards step.

The green snake giggled: "Yeah, I can see you are not afraid of me."

Claire straightened up and took a step forward: "I'm not. You can't be real. Corn Snakes never grow this big and they are harmless."

"Are we?"

Sheila's eyes were shinning and before she lashed out Claire had started running.

'_Crap, silly human. Why do they always have to run?'_ thought Jaya despondently: _'Now I'll have to pursue her or Padma will have my hide.'_

Boy, the snake was fast. There was nowhere to go but the sea. Claire closed her eyes, took a big breath and went in. She came out far from the beach, salt on her skin and hair. She turned around and noticed she was being followed. _'No, it's not possible. Corn Snakes can't swim.'_

"Claire…Claire… please wake up."

Millie sounded anguished and Peter had started shaking her.

"What?"

"Are you okay?" Peter had changed his clothes and was looking at her all worried.

'_Wow, that's a first one,'_ she thought. But she just said: "I must have fallen asleep."

"We figured that one out when we saw you snoring. Has anyone come down?"

Oh goody. Mr. Grouchy was back. Claire rubbed her eyes and said: "No, if they had they would have woken me up."

"Then you should take Millie and get some sleep. You look like you need it."

'_Yeah,__ like you are one to talk. You look like one of the living dead.'_ She probably was still half asleep because she kissed him goodbye right there in front of everyone. Lord knows what his excuse was because he kissed her back.

**Continues in Part II which is already posted.**


	5. Delerict 2

_If you can't take the heat, leave the kitchen. Aspiring chef Candace couldn't, so she had decided to quit and slit her wrists. While her big brother Peter fought to keep her in the game, her little sister Millie whispered a wish to D's snake. And, boy, did she get it. Will she and her siblings survive the experience?_

Pet Shop of Horrors

Derelict: Part II

"_Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling." __Margaret Lee Runbeck_

Candace was hiding inside a cave. She new the mean snake was waiting for her outside. It was cold and damp and she felt terribly unhappy. But she couldn't go out. She just couldn't face that horrible python again.

"Some things you can't run from, sweet pea. That only makes them want to sink their teeth in you even more, they like the chase."

The girl was a light blond and she was beautiful. She had a golden tunic falling down to the floor. She was sited on this big mushroom with her legs crossed.

"Who are you? Where am I? What's happening here? Have I gone mad? Is this Hell?"

"I've always wondered if hell is really necessary, as far as punishment goes we seem to be doing a pretty good job on our own right here."

Candace rolled into a tight ball and started crying.

"Oh, don't do that please. If I have to kneel, I'll ruin the dress."

"Oh sure, figures, the effing dress is more important than me."

"And why should you be more important to me than my dress? I've had this one for over 25 years, you know?"

"You don't look that old and the dress seems brand new."

"Well thank you, I take good care of myself. I wish I could say the same about you."

Candace looked down; she was naked and covered in mud. Plus she had bandages on her wrist and then she remembered. She had tried to kill herself.

"I couldn't even succeed at that. I'm such a loser."

"Have you ever tried to win, sweet pea?

"Have I? You can bet your fucking ass I have! I have tried so hard, always a little bit harder, always uphill, always against those who are better than me and I always get the short stick. No matter how hard I try! Perseverance always gets you shit!"

"And how does that make you feel, Candace?"

"How do you know my name?"

"Is it important?"

She decided that it wasn't, after all, this was just some sort of mad dream so the girl was a product of her sick mind: "It makes me feel sad."

"You don't sound sad, sweet pea."

No she wasn't sad, not really: "Angry…so angry I could just blow them all into pieces."

"But you didn't get them, did you? No, you took their lead and bit your own tail."

"I…I…What else could I do?"

The blond smiled at her and her fangs showed. Oddly enough Candace wasn't scared.

"You could have done what you really wanted. You could have got your revenge not on them, whoever they might be, but on him. On the one that gave you the last shove. You could still do it. I could help you, sweet pea."

"Why would you want to help me?"

The blond walked to her, made her stand up and kissed her. Well their lips were barely touching but for the looks of it the blond was sucking some pearly mist out of her. Candace was definitely going mad, she should have been terrified but she wasn't. Worse, she was kissing a girl, sort of, and she kind of liked it. She felt lightheaded.

"Because, sweet pea, you and me, we are the same."

Candace knew that at some level it was true so she returned the smile: "Ok, you're on. I'll let you help me get my revenge. So what's in it for you?"

The blond took out a triangular dagger with snakes curling around the hilt: "Nothing you haven't already thrown away, sweet pea."

An Asian girl with midnight blue black hair and a dark blue dress came from the entrance of the cave: "Yes. And you know what to do. Don't you, Candy?"

The python, Candace didn't know how she knew it but this girl was the python. And she also knew what she needed to do. She did it over the scars she already had, no point in getting a new set.

She could feel them getting inside her twisting and reshaping her. Her bones cracked under the pressure. Her body grew taller and slimmer. Her hair grew longer and lighter, almost white with the faintest yellow tint. Her eyes took on an almond shape and a dark blue shade.

The three of them left the cave and Candace looked at her new reflection in the water. She was pretty in a dangerous sort of way that made her smile. She knew the clock was ticking so she got herself going. She had a rat to catch.

* * *

"Look, cub, a meteor shower."

Claire and Millie had returned to the apartment. Candace was still out, too soon to worry about that but the doctors said the electrosomething or the other was wrong. Peter had stayed perched on one of the plastic chairs. Claire had fixed up dinner and had pretended to work until she had fallen sleep over her opened books.

Millie didn't feel sleepy so she had taken Padma out of the terrarium and was watching the night sky with her.

"Shooting stars. Mom said you could make a wish, those are a lot of wishes."

"Would you grab them all if you could, cub?"

Millie denied: "I can't think of that many wishes."

Padma laughed softly: "There are some who could and even then they wouldn't be satisfied."

"Sometimes I don't understand what you are saying."

"Oh you do, cub, is just the words that throw you off. So not even a little wish?"

"I've already told you, all I want is for us to be happy again."

"There's something you aren't saying, cub."

Millie looked down at her slippers and gave the left kitten's head a tap with her right foot.

"There's something…"

Padma sighed, there's always something. She had hoped it wasn't, but she should have known better.

"What is it, cub? You can tell me, I'll keep your secret."

Millie held Mr. Buttons closer, burying her nose in his head; sometimes she could smell her Mom when she did that. Lavender and Rosemary, she always had those in her garden.

She was about to say it but she shook her head forcefully: "No, I shouldn't. Peter says they can't come back even if they want to and that they are happy in Heaven. He wouldn't lie to me."

Padma looked at her and knew she firmly believed that. Too close, that had been too close. She realized she had started liking this cub.

"That's okay, cub. Why don't you try counting the shooting stars and see how many there are?"

The cub fell asleep before reaching a hundred.

"By the Buddha, I swear, how the mighty have fallen. The great Padma watching a human cub sleep with sheepish eyes." Takshata had walked in wearing her red shiny armor.

Padma hissed at her: "What are you doing here? You were supposed to be with the boy."

"He's heading down here. The girl is out of danger though she hasn't awoken, so they sent him home. And I think you should be more worried about the other girl, look at what Jaya is doing to her."

* * *

Claire had fallen asleep and had landed in the middle of a ragging storm. Waves rose and fell around her, she could deal with a calm ocean, but this was too much. Worse was coming. The green monster, she couldn't be called snake, was back. The thing was speeding towards her. She tried to remain calmed and swim away. She couldn't figure out where the beach was but she just had to get away from that thing.

Too late, she was swallowed. She could feel something liquid coating her. God, she was going to be digested alive. Claire started trashing and she realized they weren't digestive fluids, it was water. She was going to drown inside of a snake. Talk about your über nightmare. It wasn't a smart move but she opened her mouth to scream and the water began filling her lungs.

Peter walked in and tried to make his way in the darkened apartment. The place was a mess. Claire claimed there was an inherent order in the way she piled up her stuff. If there was one, he couldn't see it. Millie was sleeping in front of the window her head lying inches away of a fish tank with a white and a red snake. Shit, they were probably harmless but Claire was too careless. Where was she?

She was lying on her desk and under the moonlight her skin had a bluish tint. Peter noticed she wasn't breathing. His heart missed a beat: _'Not her, please, not her too.'_ He should have stayed away from her, as his instincts had told him to. He knew this would happen, everything he got close to was destroyed. And that's why he had stopped trying.

"Then let her go."

The voice came from his back. He had heard her before: "No, I won't."

Hoping that his sister wouldn't wake up he laid Claire down and put his finger in her throat trying to find out if something was obstructing it.

"Stop, it's useless. You always fail."

"I won't fail. This time, I won't."

He kneeled beside her and pressed his lips against hers. He blew in her mouth and tried to get some air in her. Then he started pressing his hands against her chest.

"It's not working."

"It has to work."

"Why? Because you want it to work? You are not the center of the universe, boy. Time won't stop for you."

Peter wanted to cry: "Because it's my fault."

"How do you figure that one out?"

"I should have done something. There must be something I could have done."

"What if there wasn't? What if there isn't?"

"Then maybe Candace is right, this world is fucked up and we should all just quit."

"Sometimes the world is fucked up, but sometimes it isn't."

"Then what are we supposed to do?"

"Pick up our fights wisely, cut our loses promptly and, sometimes, when there's nothing left to do, take comfort in tears and the company of good friends."

"I'm not cutting her loose."

"Good, then stop dragging her around halfheartedly. It's unfair to her and to you."

"Great, first I have to make her breathe."

"Carry on, boy. I'm all done here." The red curled up and set down to rest.

Claire had run out of air. That was scary enough, but what was driving her mad was that she couldn't move.

"Yesss that's what really ssscaress you… to be impotent."

"Well, thank you for the insight, you fucking bitch."

Claire tried to fight but she was growing weaker by the second.

"Let go."

"Hah! You wish. Hag!"

"Sometimes you really should let go."

Claire was standing inside a circular room. A lovely brunette in a white gown was looking at her. Was that how angels are supposed to look like?

"Where am I? Am I dead?"

"No, you aren't. But you know, dear, sometimes clutching at the steering wheel will only make you crash."

"So what are you supposed to do? No hands and see where you end?"

"Yes, sometimes you get someplace good."

"And most of the times you end with your butt in the air."

"That's a risk you can't avoid taking when you play."

"I'm not a gambler."

The girl laughed and it was like a thousand bells chiming: "We all are, whether we are having fun at the table or we are watching from the trenches."

"Sometimes the table isn't fun."

"The trenches are never fun."

"I don't know what you are talking about."

"Oh you do, but it's time for you to leave."

The girl shoved her out of the white room and Claire came through coughing. Peter was there and, good Lord, he was crying. He almost got the air out of her once more. But Claire didn't mind, she returned the embrace as tightly as his.

* * *

The moment the girl had walked in the bar he had spotted her. Leroy Chaney was a gourmet, and not only for food. The girl was a little bit too ethnic for his taste. But it'd do as an aperitif. _'The night is young'_ he thought

Candace looked around trying to find her target. He was sited on a stool drinking from a tall glass. Had he always been that old? And what was wrong with his hair? A year with him and she never knew the man dyed his hair. Something inside her giggled, something else hissed. She shrugged and thought: _'Ok, ok, gee how grouchy are we? I'll hurry up.'_

There wasn't much of fight really. The rat had fallen right into the trap with a big phony smile. Candace could hear him thinking, literally. He was a sleazebag and all his allure and class were superficial. Why hadn't she noticed before?

'_The bitch has fallen right into my lap, women are really stupid and they only serve for one thing._'

The blast of the thought had almost sent her to the floor. She tripped on her high heels.

"Are you okay?" His mouth said but his filthy mind told a different story: _'As if I care, I just don't want to deal with a clumsy cow and a broken ankle.'_

"I'm fine. I just stepped on something. I need to go to the bathroom."

Before Candace was out of his reach his mind yelled: _'Five minutes bitch. I'll give you five minutes and then I'll go find me some other piece of ass.'_

Candace was looking at the mirror: "Christ! He is disgusting. I don't want to do this anymore. He's not worth it."

"Sure you aren't just chickening out, Candy?" asked the blue one inside her.

"Of course not, he's just not worth my time. To think I was willing to…Yuck! I need to puke."

"So you are going to let him leave," said the golden one raising an eyebrow.

"Hell no! He's a pest that needs to be taken care of. But there are better ways of doing it: denouncing his sorry ass to the school board for starters. And then letting his wife know what a creep he is for seconds. Though, if she has stayed with him for this long without finding out that… Who knows? She might even deserve him."

"Oh sweet pea, that's priceless! Ok, if you're sure then now it's the time to go," said the golden one with laugher in her voice.

"We'll take it from here," ended ominously the blue one while Candace left.

* * *

The phone rang and Claire and Peter stopped kissing. Candace was awake. Thank goodness Millie wasn't, she had slept through the ruckus.

Claire let him go with certain reluctance. In all probability all his defenses would be back up when he came back. Still she managed a weak encouraging smile while she said: "You go. I'll stay with Millie."

Peter nodded absentmindedly looking at his youngest sister and asked: "What did you gave her? She slept through it all."

"A tisane, anis and chamomile, works like a charm."

"It sure does."

* * *

There was something different with the girl. Something in her eyes and in the way she swung her hips to the music. But, who cares? For what he wanted her, that was irrelevant.

Shankapala laughed and Ananta laughed too, humans can be so stupid. The guy hadn't noticed he was dancing with death under the moonlight tonight. But humans are fun to toy with. Padma wouldn't like it though, the white one always told them they shouldn't play with their food.

Leroy had taken the girl to an apartment he kept downtown. And he had gone right down to business. The bitch had shoved him away. He had to bit his lip to stop himself from slapping her.

"Slow down, tiger. At least give us a hug first."

Then the bitch had taken hold of him and started squeezing, harder and harder still. Leroy watched wide-eyed while she crushed his bones. He started trashing when the thing opened her mouth and began swallowing him, by then all the fighting was mostly for show.

* * *

"Where have you two been? The girl is fine and they all went to her."

Ananta and Shankapala looked away. Padma's eyes could become daggers. Takshata moved away from the line of fire. Jaya didn't care for her sisters' blunder. She was still sulking from the scolding she'd gotten from hers.

Padma narrowed her eyes and cried out in exasperation: "Ohhh! I can't trust any of you. You weren't supposed to do that, you blood thirsty dumbasses!"

"There wasn't actually any blood spilling." Shankapala tried to pry a smile from her. Nope, old sis, was not in the mood for smiling.

"He deserved it," pointed out Ananta who wasn't one to be sorry, especially for a good meal.

"Sure he did. But not on the little one's tab. That wasn't what she asked for and she doesn't deserve the consequences for it."

Ananta looked down and then she saw a way out: "He's still somehow here."

"Then hold hands, my sisters. Tonight, we dance."

* * *

Claire was getting ready for dinner at her neighbors'. Candace was celebrating her come back. It hadn't been easy at first but after she gave the first step others had done the same, pity the rat had smelled the storm and abandoned the ship. Candace just shrugged, all she wanted was to have her dream back and the rat could go to Hell on its own.

He wasn't the only one gone. Padma had fled. They had looked for her all over Claire's messy apartment. Then they had waited for Millie to come back from school holding their breath. She took it surprisingly well. She said Padma had told her that was going to happen, because she didn't need her anymore.

Sheila was gone too. Claire couldn't keep her. Sure it had only been a dream due to the lack of oxygen, sleep apnea the doctors had called it, but still... She had taken Sheila to the Count's Pet Shop and asked him to find her a nice home. The man had agreed and as she was leaving he had insisted on paying her. She said she would take some crickets, but he insisted on giving her money. And the man even had the nerve to tell her she should go buy a dress with it. She told him she didn't wear dresses. She'd always thought that she looked like a bear in drag in them. He suggested a print: apricot flowers. And had directed her to the place where he had his kimonos made, saying the seamstress there was a miracle worker. Claire didn't know how to feel about that last comment.

A couple of days later, Claire was looking at her reflection on the mirror and what she saw was not a bear. The seamstress had done a miracle alright, managing to make her seem feminine. But after a lifetime of wearing loose pants, she felt odd in the airy creation. The print was gorgeous, though. The bell rang. It was Peter. He looked at her and stood speechless.

"Oh, come on! It can't be that bad."

"You're wearing a dress."

"Well, no shit, Sherlock. Aren't you the little detective?"

"You never wear dresses."

The guy looked befuddle and Claire was beginning to get angry: "What, do you want me to change?"

"No, you look nice."

She blushed.

He stared intensely at her and was making her nervous.

She blabbered: "They are apricot flowers."

"What?"

"The print… they are apricot flowers."

His eyes grew dark and he literally jumped her. They landed on a bunch of articles about komodo dragons. They rolled a bit while kissing and a big dictionary fell on Peter's head.

"Ouch! That's it! We're leaving this pigsty."

"Hey, it's my home you're talking about."

"No it isn't. I'm taking you _home_."

He carried her through his threshold… Their threshold, she corrected herself, though they still had to discuss the finer points, and she could bet her ass there was going to be plenty of discussion, but that deal was closed. Besides, the poor dear deserved some points for the effort of upholding tradition. She was big enough to make that not an easy feat; especially with the bump he had in his forehead. She kissed him lightly and whispered a promise. She said she'd make it up for him as soon as they could. Candace, who after her hospital stay had developed keener senses, took the hint and walked Millie to the door.

"But dinner…" protested the little one.

"Later Hon, we're having dessert first. How about some ice-cream?"

"What about Peter and Claire?" asked the little girl frowning.

"Oh, they are having dessert first too," Candace laughed as she forced a still protesting Millie to go through the door.

"Who would have said it? Your sister is all assertive now, isn't she?"

"Live and learn."

* * *

And that's life for you people, with a little luck and a little perseverance we live to tell the tale and learn something in the process. Still we all have to pay our dues.

Padma tried not to enjoy too much watching Jaya hunting mice in the pantry. That was the easy part. But then again, despite what her sisters' thought, anger was not her thing. There are so many veils we have to lift to see the light. But hers had always been attachment. She missed the cub, so much.

She shrugged: _'Oh well, another spin in the carrousel. But as a snake, please, Buddha. Humans are sooo…Take this blond for instance.'_

"The spirits don't rest in this town. That's another case of kamikawhatever you're always ranting about," said Detective Orcot while grabbing a bunch of sugar glazed cookies and swallowing them without breathing.

"He probably flee, detective. Given what he was facing that's not a surprise." said D scowling at him, thinking not so much about the latest kamikakushi case in town but about the amount of cookies that had just disappear from his silver platter. Attachment comes in all shapes and sizes. But what incensed his ire the most was that heathen of a detective was gobbling his almond glazed sugar cookies as if they weren't precious delicacies, each one as unique as a snowflake.

"Yes, the chief also thinks he's fled. But I have a hunch he didn't have the chance to. We've managed to find this apartment he had. Man, you wouldn't believe the stench. If they'd let me, I'd have lifted the floorboards. He's probably down there."

"Have another cookie, detective." It really pained D, but if that was the price to keep the detective's mouth shut… He was willing to pay it.

'_We all have to pay our dues, eventually,'_ thought Padma letting her attention drift from the pair having tea and nagging happily at each other back to her sisters. Take for example Ananta and Shankapala, who were having guard duty, and had hissed the detective away from the cage on the counter.

"That's disgusting! What are a sewer rat and two snakes doing right beside the food?"

"They are keeping an eye on him. And he is food too, detective," said D with a sinister smile.

"Food?"

"Yes, a delicacy on its own right. In this case, he's waiting for a meeting with a client's cobra. No one seems to want him as a pet."

"That's a no brainer," said Leo grabbing another bunch of cookies but before he threw them down his gullet he frowned and asked: "Hey! Why don't the snakes eat it?"

"Oh they know better than that… now," D could barely hold back a smile.

"He is not a looker but I think it's cruel to keep him just to be eaten. I would've thought that out of anyone in this world you'd agree. What with being a vegan and all that."

"This world is all about eating or being eaten, detective. And, even if you happen to find yourself on top of the food chain, you still have the risk of ending up being eaten by your own demons. Though some pull through and come back wiser from that battle."

"Uh?"

"Then again some don't get a clue of what's happening. Do have some more cookies, dear detective."

Padma and D chuckled. Leon frowned; he just didn't get the joke.

_AN: __The title is sort of an uncommon word so I'm sparing you the bother of picking up a dictionary, it's a nautical term for abandoned ships, also it means to quit voluntarily.  
To me suicide is the ultimate expression of anger since you hurt others by hurting yourself. In a sense it's like saying to life: 'So you don't like me? Good, I don't like you either.'  
I'm not one to cast stones I've been known to direct anger towards others and myself. But to quit the game for such a rat…that makes me want to kick someone. Ups, guess I'm a few steps away from enlightenment too.  
Now, snakes, oh how I love them. In Tibetan Buddhist iconography the serpent appears most often as a symbol of anger, one of the 3 defilements or veils. (The others are attachment and ignorance.)  
No wonder then that snakes are considered the appropriate ornament of the wrathful deities. In this case I was thinking of Vajrakila, or Vajrakilaya, the god of purification. He has his hair tied up in a white snake. In his ears are a couple of yellow ones and around his neck is a red one. Green snakes form his anklets and bracelets; while a midnight blue serpent serves as a sautoir (a long necklace, longer than opera-length -30-35 inches- often with an ornamental tassel or pendant at the end) he holds a p'hurba a "spirit nail" or spirit dagger with entwined snakes on its triangular blade.  
The identities of some of these snakes are: dark blue Ananta, red Takshata, white Padma, yellow Shankapala, and green Jaya. Feel free to use any if it strikes your fancy, remember anything older than 100 years is public domain.  
In China there are quite a lot of legends of snakes turning into girls. They usually fall for a mortal and end up badly. For some reason in the cheap kung-fu movies I favor, white snakes play the good gals and the strumpets are always green snakes. Anyway, I wanted to write a story in which they were not the ones taking the crap.  
The little girl's pet is actually an albino Corn Snake of a shade called blizzard. They have the anerythristic recessive trait gene. That means they are pure white and are more common than may be implied by the story. They are wonderful pets because they are smaller and less aggressive than other rat catchers. Inoffensive really, that is if you aren't a rat, a snake called by any other name is still a snake._

_**Mercurial Weather**__**  
Curses or Comments? They are all appreciated.**_


	6. Flowers and the Detective Clingy

_**Forewo**__**rd: Oh yes! Yet another story of Count D, though now I've decided to go vegan. And, as usual, I have a scapegoat to bear the guilt for me. In this case that horrible parasitic liana who inspired the tale deserves it. You know who you are, honey. Suck it up. That was a close call, I'm relived I escaped from your grasp, suffocation must be a horrible way to go. Bianca is also inspired on a friend who's quite sporty. Girl, I owe you big time for kicking that weed's ass.**_

**Pet Shop of Horrors**

**Flowers and the Detective: Clingy**

"_She slides down inside your skin  
In time she will make you scream  
She's death in a ghoul's white dress  
She rides in the night of your mind  
Oh yeah! She rides!"  
From the song 'She rides' by Danzig_

_1.1 You can't judge a book by its cover:_

Cassy was flown to D's garden by a jet stream. She took a look at the thriving green and she let go. She fell in the midst of a petunia parterre. Those gals went into hysterics. Is hard to hide when you are a redhead among mousy blonds, they can see you coming from a mile away, and when your intentions are less than honorable that is a handicap.

She strangled a couple of the closer ones that seemed ready to scream and caught the next gust of wind. She could hear the petunias sigh in relief. Flowers are so dumb. And they couldn't give her what she needed.

Before letting go and falling on the ground once more, she scouted the terrain. Jackpot! And old oak, who looked as if he had been there for centuries, with moss covering his trunk and a host of creatures populating his roots and branches. Cassy licked her lips and thought: dinner is ready.

She leaned faintly against the oak, giving him a big bright smile, leaning forward a bit so he could have a good look at her cleavage. That goes to prove old doesn't equate wise. The old geezer was from a mild climate, Cassy was Hawaiian and he hadn't known her for what she was.

She wished most people were as trusting as this asshole. That way she wouldn't have to keep running away. Yup, she was a fugitive. Things had gotten too hot back home and she had flown away while things cooled a little bit. The poor oak didn't know who he was dealing with, so he let her clung to his trunk.

She put her arms around him and pierced his neck with her fangs, the oak just hold her tighter while she drank. She was famished so she didn't notice the kakatoo that rose to the sky and dived through the door that led to the pet shop.

D was fixing a platter for teatime, he was expecting company. That thought made him smile. They didn't have a formal appointment, but Detective Orcot usually showed up around noon. Theoretically he came to question him about this case or the other. D suspected he came for a free lunch.

He didn't mind, he was in a good mood. He had just purchased an albino gorilla from a couple of brutes that kept him chained and passed him as the Yeti. He had also showed them what a real Yeti looked like. Those ungrateful heathens hadn't appreciated Snowball's beauty and had dared fire their shotguns at him. Well, some people never learn…Until they get filed in a tombstone under D for deceased, and then it's too late for them to make amends.

Bianca came running through the canteen stile door. She was out of breath and her bright yellow mohawk flapped over her head. Her short white dress and white Mary Jane shoes shone against the kitchen's dark mustard tiles. The golden ring on her aquiline nose shook with each ragged inhalation.

It was so odd seeing her in. Since she had arrived to the pet shop, she'd kept to herself and preferred to be left alone. She usually hid in one of the garden's corners, between the sycamore's branches. D had let her. He figured she needed time to feel comfortable in her new home. The poor dear had had quite a bit of those. D smiled at her and waited for what she had to say. She opened her mouth to speak but all that came out was a squawk.

She breathed in and tried again: "Trouble! Trouble in the garden! SQUAWK! Old Grey! Cassytha!"

Before she could finish D had taken off his apron and was heading for the crystal door that led to the garden, teatime could wait. He rushed to the spot where Old Grey lived and arrived just in time to see the oak embracing the little red tramp.

D looked at her with his golden eye and then with his violet one. Q-chan fluttered above his head, D didn't need the little vamp bunny to tell him this girl meant big trouble in his little Chinatown shop.

Cassy felt D's stare burying like a dagger on her nape. Oh boy! Of all the gardens she could have landed in, she had picked the one where this Chinaman lived. She sighed and let go of the old geezer. Then she turned around cleaning her bloodied lips with the back of her hand and gave the man in the kimono a tentative smile.

"Good afternoon. I hope I'm not intruding. I just stopped here on my way to Florida. The journey has been long and I'm a little bit tired. I was hoping you would let me stay the night."

She even sprouted some flowers. That had worked before. You'll be surprised of how many morons have condemned their gardens on the false assumption that weeds couldn't have pretty flowers. But this man was not a moron. He was unfazed by Cassy's flowery display.

"Usually my guests wait to be let in before helping themselves to their meals."

'_Shit'_, she thought. The look on the man's face didn't bode well for Cassy.

"I…That was incredibly rude, but you see, I was starving and of course I wasn't planning to harm him. Tee hee, he seemed to be enjoying it," she batted her eyelashes in what she hoped was an innocent way.

"Really?" D didn't buy it. He doubted that girl had been innocent anytime since she was birthed.

D was running his hand down Old Grey's trunk. The poor thing was looking at the sky with lost eyes. D kneeled and whispered to some ants, a small army of the red insects started massaging Old Grey, trying to get his sap circulating once more.

'_Ok Cassy, it's now or never. No more Miss Nice Girl'_. She lashed out, her flowers turning to thorns. The blow knocked down the Chinaman but Cassy only grazed his neck thanks to the blasted kakatoo that had gotten in between.

Bianca yelled: "Back off! Slut! Squawk!"

Cassy slapped her and blood droplets stained Bianca's white dress but the kakatoo wasn't up for a catfight so she punched Cassy right in the face.

"That's it! You psycho punk parrot! You're like so dead!"

"Bring it on, weed!"

Cassy went for the nose ring. That'd teach that parrot not to mess with a cassytha. Bianca ducked and kicked high. She connected one, right on Cassy's stomach. Cassy got up and went for the kakatoo claws first. She was received by a speed jab followed by a right uppercut which landed on the weed's plexus solar. That made her drop to the ground. That bird was strong. She hoisted Cassy over her head.

"Let go off me, you harpy!" Cassy yelled breathlessly.

Cassy got hold of the bright yellow crest but Bianca didn't seem to mind. The kakatoo leaned on her knees and then rose.

"With pleasure"

Smiling, Bianca threw her over the garden's wall. As was usually the case whenever she was being impulsive, she was going to regret it. Cassy floated for a second and landed on top of Leon Orcot.

_1.2 There's one __born every minute:_

"What the…?" He stopped mesmerized by the gorgeous creature that had just dropped on his lap.

"You can see me?"

Cassy couldn't believe it. This mortal man was able to see her. How? She put her hand over her lips and found the answer. She passed her tongue over her finger tips and had to bite her lips to keep herself from moaning. She'd never tasted anything so delicious. That Chinaman's blood was out of this world.

"Are you hurt, Miss? Do you need help?"

Hurt indeed. That horrid parrot had rough her up quite a bit. She heard fluttering coming from the other side of the wall. She needed to get the hell out before the parrot came to finish the job.

"They are following me. We need to leave."

"I'm a cop Miss. I'll protect you."

'_Fuck',_ just her luck. A pig. Well, the moment they were out of sight she was having herself a Luau.

"No, you don't understand. Those men are dangerous! We need to leave now!"

She placed her hand on his chest and ran her leg against his tight. Yup, he was a sucker alright and, with a little luck, Cassy was going to suck him dry.

"Come, my car is nearby."

Bianca got to the edge of the fence just in time to see the weed toying with D's human pet. Before she could move, they ran and now they were leaving in the human's crummy car. She scratched her crest with her paw, trying to decide what to do. Then she looked back at D. He was still out cold. A couple of violets were cradling his head, moistening his forehead with dewdrops. '_Squawk!'_ He wasn't going to like this. Not a little bit.

She yelled at the violets: "Yo, when he wakes up, you tell him what happened."

The violets shied away, they went purple but didn't answer. '_Christ!'_ She didn't have time for this. She turned to a Jasmine creeper: "You do it. You tell him that weed is with his human."

The Jasmin raised an eyebrow: "Why don't you tell him yourself? I'm not your errand boy."

Those frigging Jasmines thought they were aristocrats. Any other time and Bianca would have shown them what she thought of that.

"Just do it, you stupid flowery tart, or we'll all be in big trouble."

The Jasmin snorted: "No way! I don't need to listen to your rude remarks. You do it yourself. What? Are you going to be too busy looking for a new outfit? It won't work. What you need is an attitude transplant."

The whole garden shook in laughter. Even the blushing violets laughed hiding behind their petals.

"I'm following that devil's gut. And if you have something beside pollen inside that corolla of yours, you'll be praying I get to D's human pet on time."

Before she could force fed some sense into the Jasmine, Q-chan came back with reinforcements. The flesh eaters looked ready to rumble, but there was little they could do to follow the cassytha, for that it was better to go high. Plus she preferred to work solo. Bianca told Q-chan what she had told the flowers and she jumped over the edge of the fence.

'_Squawk!'_ She shouldn't have thrown out the garbage before making sure it was harmless. She needed some anger management classes. And, right after she finished dealing with that liana, she was going to work on it. Until then… she cracked her knuckles, spread her wings and took flight.

Cassy just couldn't let go. She dare not let go off the dashboard. That idiot human drove like a madman. '_The moment he stops the car, I'm digging my fangs on his neck and making him pay for this'_.

"Are you aright? You look green." He turned to face her.

'_Hah!'_ Impossible, she had not chlorophyll, but she was now a very pale orange.

"I'm fine. I'm perfectly fine. Just keep your eyes on the road."

"Don't worry. I'm taking you to the precinct and we are going to make sure those guys never hurt you again."

Cassy looked bewildered from the hand he had placed on her shoulder to the huge trailer that was heading their way. And, for the first time in the one hundred seventy eight odd years she had been on this earth, she fainted.

"So you don't know anything about this gal, not even her name. She fell on your head and claimed she was being pursued by some evil men. So, you got her on your car where she fainted and now she's here."

"Yes, the problem is I can't figure out who she is."

"Has a doctor seen her?"

"She is fine, she just fainted."

Jill thought that the way Leon drove that was to be expected. '_That's why I always drive when we're out.'_

Then she pointed out: "Says the medical expert. Take her to a hospital and let them handle it."

"No, I promised her I'd protect her."

"Protect her from whom?"

"Who knows? In Chinatown it could be anyone."

Jill raised her eyes to the sky: "Oh God! Here we go again! Do you have an actual suspect? Do you have anything to make you believe she wasn't feeding you a load of crap?"

"Jill, just look at her, someone beat her up badly." Though, even then she was just so beautiful

"We are homicides! And there's two months paperwork to catch up with!" Jill wanted to scream at him: '_And I have no time for this. I'm not going to drop everything I'm doing just because you can't help ogling the first pair of legs that walks by your side_.

"My cop's instincts tell me there's more to it."

"Your cop's instincts have told you an iguana can eat a grown-up man whole."

"They've also saved your butt a couple of times."

Bastard, that was a cheap shot, but he was right. She sighed: "Ok, I'll check around. And stop drooling over her, Leon. It's disgusting."

"No it isn't." He said looking at the girl's cleavage.

"I wasn't talking about her, but you sure are." _Men!_ Thank god they weren't all like Leon Orcot or she'd die an old maid.

"Thanks, Jill. I'm sure you'll come up with something."

"Yeah right, with no ID whatsoever. You've already checked it and she doesn't fit the description of any missing person report. If she had disappeared in a puff of smoke, this would be a ghost story."

He didn't hear her. He was carrying the unconscious girl into the interrogation room they used as coffee lounge when the boss was out.

"Jill! Phone for you!" yelled Johnson.

"Who is it?"

"Didn't give a name, just said it was urgent. On line 5," he said handing her the phone.

"Hello?"

The line must have been broken. Jill heard an squawk and then someone screamed: "Danger!"

"Who is this?"

"Danger!"

"Is this a joke? Boy, did you pick the wrong day to do this. Listen asshole, I'm tracing this call and you'll regret the day you were born."

The voice grew louder: "Orcot! Danger!"

"Who is this?"

"Orcot! Danger! Girl! Squawk!"

They hung up. In other circumstances Jill would have let it go as a prank call, but she had cop instincts too. So she went straight to the make-shift coffee lounge and nearly got killed for her troubles.

Bianca had to hang up the phone. A little old lady dressed in black who had been waiting to use the phone had started making the sign of the cross at her. She didn't mean to scare the poor woman, so she flew to the ledge of a window in a nearby building.

The little old lady started praying. Bianca hid behind a flag pole. One of her former owners had been a priest. Back in a Pacific Ocean island, the man felt lonely and he had drunk a little too much. But he was a fervent Catholic and a good man. He had taught Bianca to respect that. Such a pity his liver had given up on him long before Bianca did.

From the window's ledge she looked for a way to get into the Police Precinct. She had to hurry up, before it was too late.

'_That's great girl, four months and you've manage to get in trouble. Just fucking great!'_. And she really liked the place and that D dude.

'_Then stop whining, dumbass, get in there and get rid of that pest.'_ She was not a whiner, and the few moments of insight she had, had taught her to trust her inner voice, which didn't stop her from engaging in these long winded discussions with her badmouthed conscience.

'_Sure, any idea of how?' _It'd been a long time since her last inner dialogue. Usually she only did those when she was in deep. Not a good sign at all.

'_Damn! Do I have to do everything for you? Figure something out!'_

She scratched her crest with her claws and remembered her second owner. That one had been an ornithologist from New Zealand. Nice guy too, a bit of a nut, somewhere in between a scholar and a surfer dude. He loved extreme sports. But he was a real nice guy and sometimes he even made sense. Once he had taken her paragliding and he'd told her: 'Always see where you're going to land before jumping'.

If he had taken his own advice he wouldn't have landed head first into a ravine and would still be alive. But he was right. So Bianca took a time out to reflect upon where the hell she was going to land.

_1.3 A rose by any other name:_

"Where's Leon?"

"He went out to get something to eat. The girl is awake, she's in the bathroom."

Jill knocked on the door and waited. Strange sounds were coming from inside the bathroom.

"Are you ok?"

There was no answer. Jill took out her gun and went in. Before she could do anything, she was wrapped in a tight embrace by red stems. She was about to scream when more tentacle like sprouts covered her face. But not before she could see Lieutenant O'Hara lying listlessly on the bathroom floor. Lizzie O'Hara was pale, with dead pallor. Jill felt her stomach lurch, but right then and there she was forced to put all her attention on the monstrosity that the girl Leon had brought had become.

Cassy had been so hungry. For the second time that day her meal had been interrupted. And that foolish human had left her when she had said she needed to eat. She had been so weak she would have probably withered if it wasn't for the silly biped flower that had entered the room she was in and had helped her get into the restroom.

After drinking some water she had felt well enough to go for the woman. Human blood was nothing like the Chinaman's blood, but it was good enough to nurture her. She was wondering how she could get out of the room without drawing attention when another silly flower had walked in on her.

'_Oh goody! More fodder'_, against her mother's advice, she felt like playing with her food. The heck with her mother's advice, she'd never cared for that biatch. How had she hated that hag all the way through the fifteen years she had hung from her skirt. She loosened her grip and pulled the blond hair from the girl's face.

The girl looked at her with panic filled eyes. Cassytha giggled. It was more fun when they knew what was coming and then again, it was also fun when they didn't.

"Don't be afraid. I'm not going to harm you. That is, if you behave."

That girl was a fighter. She fretted and twisted like a fly on a spider's web. Cassy let her for a while and then began tightening her grip. She watched while the girl went from a soft pink to a light blue and then to purple. Got to give it to her, she fought till her breath ran out. Cassy let go a little bit.

"Now are you ready to be a good girl?"

"Mmm."

"What's that dear?"

Cassy freed the girl's mouth and leaned closer to hear what the flower had to say, everyone deserves to have some last words. That little foul beast spat on her face!

"You hideous biped, you are going to live long enough to regret that!"

Cassy stretched to her full length and dragged the flower along the floor and up one of the walls. She hoisted her with her legs and arms spread in a cross, and then she sprouted another stem, this one with a pointy tip.

She ripped Jill's clothes and began trailing red paths on the flower's flesh. Brave little creature, the girl bit her lip and tried not to scream. '_Then we have to figure out a way to make her',_ thought Cassy.

"Mama used to say you could catch more flies with honey…Should we try that?"

She ran a thorn filled stem down the girl's cheek being especially careful not to make her bleed. The girl sobbed a little and then went limp. Stupid flowers, so like them to faint and ruin Cassy's fun.

'_Hate to eat and leave… but might as well.'_

She let her go to get a better grip and the flower got on her feet. Cassy was caught by surprise and found out her mom had been right, you shouldn't play with your food and some flowers have thorns too.

Jill was dizzy and she was half blinded by her own blood but she had fired her gun under worst conditions. Her shooting range teachers would've been proud of her. All the way through her ordeal, she hadn't lost grip on her gun. As soon as she got a chance she fired and her bullet went right to where a heart should have been. Such a pity plants don't have a heart.

It wasn't a mortal wound, but it hurt like hell and Cassy was loosing the precious blood it had been so hard to collect. She turned around ready to punish the flower but the girl was still pointing the gun at her.

'_How can she still be standing?!'_ The hell with discretion Cassytha needed to get the hell out.

As soon as the monster left, Jill fell to the floor. She tried to get up but she couldn't. She tried to focus on breathing while thinking: '_Someone must have heard the gunshot. Someone must be out there. They will look at that thing and know it's a monster. Someone will stop it before it gets Leon.'_ That was her last thought before plunging into darkness.

'_Hell!'_ Cassy was emptying through her wounds once more, she could feel herself weakening. She was about to turn back and get the stupid flower for hurting her when she bumped into the mortal that had driven her there. Great, it was her lucky day.

She didn't waste time with pretence she took his hand and injected him with enough numbing sap to allow him to walk but little else. Then she used him to cover her retreat and get out to a quiet alley where she could finally have a decent meal and get out of that crappy town.

_1.4 There's nothing more fearsome than a cornered enemy_

Bianca was lucky, two minutes earlier or two minutes later and she would have missed the weed and D's human. But she'd been right on time. And that hell vine was going to regret the day she had crossed Bianca's path.

_'Such a cute little human,'_ thought Cassy. The blond smiled at her while she got rid of the ugly t-shirt he was wearing. He even smiled at her while he was pierced by a thousand little needles.

Bianca looked at them, thinking about her third owner who had been a Voodoo priestess. She was the one that had given her the golden ring to wear on her nose as protection against her enemies. Pity she didn't wore one herself. Maybe that way that Voodoo man wouldn't have killed her and her lover. Bianca had liked the lover too. He had been a kick boxer. The kakatoo had seen him practice for hours unending. That hadn't helped him against the rot that ate him from within. He had been a good fighter but one can't fight backhanded magicians with a head on attitude. Bianca had learned that lesson well, so she took a look at D's human and saw the weed had done some bad mojo on him. He looked like a zombie. And she knew how those were made, so the weed had doped the poor bastard. And no help was going to come from that quarter. But still Bianca had the element of surprise and sometimes the best defense is to attack.

The bird appeared from out of nowhere and smashed Cassy's head against the brick wall. Another well placed kick and Cassy was barely able to duck. She lashed out blindly, loosing grip on the human.

"You are so dead, parrot!"

"It's kakatoo, you dumb grass. And the only funeral we're having is you on a heap of burning trash."

Easier said than done, the devil's gut had grown stronger since the last time they've danced. Bianca landed on a trash bin and broke her right arm with a loud crack.

"Now, I'm going to enjoy this."

No way, Bianca was no estranger to pain. After the Voodoo priestess she had had a long list of "owners". Some have been real assholes who only got a pet to have an outlet for their anger. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And Bianca was alive and kicking. What had happened to her had made her tough as a nails. And she was as good with her left hand as she was with her right.

After roughing the cassytha a bit she asked: "Tell me weed, enjoying the ride yet?"

Cassy couldn't answer, the kakatoo had kicked her and she hit the floor. Before she could gather her bearings the bird had her in a lock. That's irony for you people. In a very physical display of poetical justice the parrot was trying to strangle her. What that bastard bird didn't know was that wouldn't be an easy task, she breathed through every pore. But the bird was crushing her and that hurt. She grew thorns but the bird didn't let go. The dumb bird was covered in red splashes of blood, but she didn't let go, stubborn beast.

That deadlock had been a pyrrhic victory, the liana was still breathing and Bianca was bleeding. The Pyrrhic thing came from a guy who was a book worm and liked to read out loud for Bianca. He hadn't been that bad either, but her daughter had been hell spawn. The weed reminded her of the little bitch. What was it the man had said? A cornered enemy is indeed fearsome, either leave him a way to escape or finish him off. Good advice, she began shredding the weed with her strong black beak. Miss Primrose didn't like that and she sprouted more thorns and started oozing some crap.

So that was she had used to zombify the human. Stupid weed! Bianca's tongue was made to deal with all sort of ozzes from the insects she ate. She smiled: "Mmm. Spicy! That might work with the biped, weed, but no luck with me."

"Then what about this!" Said the Cassytha, getting out of the deadlock.

'_Bianca, you dumbass!'_ She got distracted and now she was hurt and the Woe vine was free. '_Am I up for a do over? Maybe not. But I'm not a quitter.'_

After a couple of rounds she managed to grapple the weed once more. Turns out that three years living with a boxer that has the bad habit of mistaking you for a punching bag can be a perk…Bianca had resilience and she also had the weed back where she wanted to; then she decided there was no time for being gentle. She snapped the vine's neck.

Cassytha was broken, but still alive. If she could only reach the human she'll recover a bit and then she was going to turn that fucking parrot inside out and keep her alive for a week while she slowly sucked on her blood.

Bianca was doing what could very well be her last stand. She couldn't risk losing focus. She couldn't let go or she was a goner, and she really liked being on the blue spherical nut house.

'_Funny, it's been a rough ride but I actually like it here.'_

Cassy crawled softly towards Leon.

Who knows what would have happened if D hadn't showed up? Sharp nails flashed in the dark ally and then Cassytha was no more.

Bianca could barely stand up but she yelled: "Hey, dude! I had her! I needed no help."

"We all need help sometimes, Bianca. And I'm glad you were there to help me when I needed it."

'_Christ!'_ She blushed. Then she hid behind her wings. Kakatoos look bad in pink, that's for flamingoes. Still Bianca had a healthy blush all the way back to the Pet Shop. D had to carry her because she couldn't fly with her broken wing.

_1.5 __There's no place like home:_

Leon Orcot was having a crappy day. He had been sent home for a couple of days, allegedly so he could recover from the blood loss. He couldn't go to Lieutenant's O' Hara funeral and he couldn't visit Jill in the hospital.

What was killing him was he had been unable to protect the girl he had promised to keep safe. She was gone, and if he could judge by what those freaks had done to Jill and O' Hara, the girl was better off dead. But what really made him mad was that he was unable, at least for a while, to look for those bastards that had done this to his friends and himself.

He said between teeth: "The minute I'm out of this bed, I'll make you wish you were dead too."

"Oh Detective, always so prone to violence, give your poor liver a rest."

'_Fuck!' _Having D fussing over him wasn't helping him with the anger management. And if he could, he would definitely exercise violence against the Count.

He couldn't say why, but he felt that oddball had played a part in all of it. And somehow he was going to prove it, eventually. It was too much of a coincidence he had happened to find him and Jill.

"If you don't like it, you can leave."

"My dear Detective, you have no manners. I'm only here to help you."

"If you really want to help me, tell me all you know of what happened in the precinct."

"I've told you everything I know," said D with a smile that belied his sincerity.

"I don't have time for your bull! A girl is missing! A girl I was supposed to protect!"

"And the fact she was really pretty has nothing to do with your urgency to go find her?"

Leon wanted to wipe that smile off D's face, with a big fist if he got to pick.

"I promised her! And she trusted me! The poor innocent girl trusted me!"

"QUACK!"

Why D had to bring that parrot? Leon could have sworn that bird was mocking him, he looked at him with one beady black eye and then with the other.

"What does that bird thinks he is? A duck?"

"She's a girl and you are truly an ingrate. You should be grateful she is trying to help you too."

"CRACK POT!"

"Make her stop or, against my long standing policy of not hitting a lady, I'll twist her neck!"

"I think that she might end up twisting yours, if you were to face her."

"Yeah. Right. I tremble at the thought of facing a parrot with a broken wing. She'll sure kick my butt."

"Well, sometimes brains get the upper hand against brute force. It's been known to happen."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Come on, Bianca. We'll let the madman cool off a bit while we fix supper."

"Yeah! You leave with your beast and let me think about that poor lovely girl."

"SLUT!"

"Shut up bird! Why don't you fly south?"

"Don't you listen to him, Bianca. You are welcome here for as long as you want. Give your wings a rest, you are safe here and you we've welcomed you from day one, even if you needed some time to realize this for yourself."

Boy, he was smart, and so was Bianca. It had taken her a while but she had ended up figuring that one on her own. She liked the fact she could do most things on her own, but sometimes it's good to have someone to cover your back. And sometimes it's good to have someone that can make you laugh, like that blond dude.

"SUCKER!"

D laughed: "Yes, this isn't the first time he's been mistaken for a lollypop."

"You're mad D. Ya know? Totally mental!"

Bianca giggled:_ 'Gosh! He also has a sense of humor. That's it! I really like this dude. I think I'm staying here for a while. Oh, who am I kidding? This D guy is a keeper.'_

_**Ok before we do the Discovery Channel**__**. Let's address clingy. You must know what I'm talking about. Who hasn't had a "friend" who takes and takes and never gives back? You know… the kind that's always there when there's something to be gained and drops you in a beat when you actually need them. One that sucks warm, joy and life out of you and leave you fainting while they whistle a catchy tune on the way back to their lair. **_

_**Well, I recently had a close call with one and: Yikes! You dumb Mercurial shame on you! Almost felt in the tangle. Vanushka, thanks girl for the warning and the superb reflexes you have. Watch out people! Those clingy vines are everywhere, smiling at you with open arms ready to claim your life if you let them. Have your pruning scissors ready and if you see one climbing on a friend: Kick its butt! That's what friendship is all about!**_

_**The one in the story is part of the **__**Cassytha**__** (Family Lauraceae and sometimes a family of its own) which is a genus of nonegreen parasitic plants, also known as Woe vines. They may have pale red, yellow or orange stems and are related to Magnolias. Their leaves are minute and have next to none chlorophyll, so they are entirely dependant on the host plant for food. They can be found in tropical regions throughout the world and in the States they are prevalent in Florida and Hawaii; but they can survive in temperate climates and there are four species native to Europe.**_

_**This particular gal is one Cassytha filiformis, commonly known as devil's guts, hell's weed or love weed; this little darling penetrates into the stem (vascular system) of the host plant, then its roots die and it sucks its host dry. Small shrubs, tall trees, you name it. And, of course, they don't live to be a hundred years old, they have no zombie fluid and they reproduce by seeds, but that's poetic license for you people. I like vamps.**_

_**Curses or Comments? To those who have R&R: Thank you very much. To those who haven't, don't worry I know those spiky keyboards can be **__**hell on the fingertips.**_


End file.
